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    High physical memory usage

    Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by matixryder, Jul 15, 2009.

  1. matixryder

    matixryder Notebook Consultant

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    Hello everyone. I have a Sony Vaio fw 490 CTo for a week and it's running window vista home premium 64x everything doing fine until i got freeze when playing game. I open taskbar manager and saw my physical memory is at 90%. I Tried to restart the comp and my computer archieve 90% physical memory usage without any program open.... What should i do now? Is this my lappy problem or my os problem?
     
    matixryder, Jul 15, 2009
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  2. nacholambre

    nacholambre Notebook Consultant

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    I believe you have a virus. Please do virus scan ASAP!

    You can also shut SuperFetch off! Try that too!
     
    nacholambre, Jul 15, 2009
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  3. matixryder

    matixryder Notebook Consultant

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    ok how to do superfetch off btw thank you for ur attention
     
    matixryder, Jul 15, 2009
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  4. arth1

    arth1 a҉r҉t҉h

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    Vista has learned a lesson from Linux, and uses most of the available RAM for file system caching when nothing else uses it. If a program requests more RAM, the OS simply drops some of the file system cache, and gives it to the program. It's a win/win situation.
    To find out how much memory you really have available, open the task manager, and look at the performance tab. Then take the number listed for Total under "Physical Memory (MB)", add the number listed for Cached, and finally subtract the amount listed under the green bar for Memory.

    In my case, right now, I have 3002 MB total, 1165 cached and 1.98 GB used. 1.98 GB equals 2027 MB (multiply by 1024), so the available memory is 3002+1165-2027 MB, or 2140 MB available to any program that might need it.

    Superfetch is a program that anticipates what you might run next based on your usage history, and fills up the cache with those files when you're not doing anything else. If you start Outlook every weekday at 8 AM, and a game every Saturday night, it's smart enough to prime just that to reduce start-up times.
    The downside is that if you're not very predictable, and have a huge amount of varied software installed, using that cache for standard "most-recently-used" caching will produce better results than superfetch. And save power, because the drive doesn't have to spin up so it can read stuff in advance.

    I would not recommend disabling superfetch. Especially not if you also use readyboost, which depends on superfetch being enabled.
     
    arth1, Jul 15, 2009
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