27% memory usage at desktop with no apps running?!?!

I just got my new laptop with windows vista premium. When I am just at the desktop with no applications running my memory usage is around 27% (of 2 gigs). Does this sound normal? I dont have any programs starting up at start up besides microsofts windows programs, bluetooth and ATIS's catalyst center. Would turning off aero windows help? How do I even do that?

Thanks, Josh

 

That's about 300-400mb? Sounds normal. Though I am not 'down' with Vista as I am still using XP

No apps running? You sure background processes aren't running? Even if you "quit" an app, it can still leave a process. But again, I don't know if its different for Vista...

 

Vista tends to use otherwise unused memory as far as possible. Why shouldn't it? Unused memory is wasted memory.

What matters is that it doesn't affect performance of running programs, and if you still have 73% memory free, that certainly won't be a problem.

And when you load more demanding programs, Vista will free up some of the memory it uses. And unused data will be pushed to the pagefile, freeing up still more RAM.

 

Thanks for the reassurance! Its about 550mb. I been throught the processes a million times and I don't see anything out of the ordinary. One "svchost" process is using up the most by far along with the other smaller "svchosts".

 

That's vista for ya. Actually vista is faster than XP for me. But, I'm sticking for XP for now for compatability reasons. Aero should make things faster though, if you wish. But, if you're like me, I love eyecandy.

 

werd

Josh

 

I believe if you get ATI Catalyst Control Center 7.4 and up they slimmed down CCC so it only runs one process and uses less memory.

If not dump ATI CCC and replace it with ATI Tray Tools.

 

Try to disable some services. Get rid of bloat-ware. Get rid of some of the task schedulers. Use run>msconfig to disable some start-up programs that are unnecessary.

 

Thanks, I'll give it a try!

Did it

 

Vista does use up alot of memory, the more memory thats free the more it will take.

2gb into 4gb of ram on a desktop and vista took up 80% more ram space.

Dont worry tho, when another app needs memory (like a game) vista will unload alot of those resources and memory use goes way down.

 

Yeah, I'm trying not to feel too bad about the whole physical memory usage in vista. Im so used to seeing around 25 processes running with 0% memory usage in XP that now, I'm seeing 57+ processes and around 51%+ physical memory usage that I'm kind of feel uneasy.

But then again, thats what Vista does.

But sheez, 56 processes is the lowest I can get it down to. Sucks. I at least want lower then 50. My lowest physical memory usage I got it down to was around 38% being idled. Usually, I'm at 56+ish.

So try not to worry so much. Gotta get used to seeing it switching over from XP

 

What's your CPU usage at at idle? If it's not very high, it doesn't matter. Do your applications run like you expect them to? If so, you're good. If not, you have a problem
Really, there's no reason to let resources on your computer go unused. I have a gig of RAM on my Linux desktop machine, and it has 19MB "free". But that's not the whole story... if you take out the cached data, it's got 706MB free, which means when I start a new application, it can take up to 706MB of real memory, if it needs it. The same kind of thing happens on Vista. The memory is "used", but it's available for anything that requests it.

Think of it like cleaning up the store while waiting for a customer to come in. It's just something for the computer to do that makes everything work a bit better, but the customer/program still gets all of the computer's attention that it can give when he's there.

 

My baseline(Vista + IE) usage is 400M, and it was 180M in XP. So there is a difference but not too outrageous.

What surprised me is that on bootup, it performs some task that needs up to 800M. This may explain why there are complains that Vista is slow to boot. I can imaging that if I only have 512M RAM and it would swap like hell during the bootup/login process.

 

after lots of tweaking (and a few 'why doesn't that work anymore' moments) i now have my processes down to 39 in vista, that's about 23ish% of RAM (2gb) when idle and after vista has finished doin whatever it likes to do at startup!!

ive only got 5 startup items; 3 of them are nvidia, 1 is defender and 5th is objectdock

it's running soo fast at the moment, done loads of performance tweaks and i have to say it is a lot quicker than i ever managed to get XP. superfetch seems to work really well!!

 

As said in the post just above you, your "baseline" measurement is invalid.

 

Invalid in what sense ?

 

cahoole, where did you go to find your tweaks at?

 

i have xp and 1gb ram and when its started it it will always be less than 600mb but more than 500mb, with 60 process which is the lowest i can go

 

blackmamba - i used a number of sites including:

http://www.speedyvista.com/services.html

http://www.linkinn.com/wiki_101.php?add=wiki&id=4748&select=All

http://thevistaforums.com/index.php?showforum=57

and a good thread from there =

http://thevistaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=7871

i also messed around A LOT to see what gives me the best performance with the best working environment!!

sometimes i think i should be more careful but i make sure i back up all my important docs and if i have to i'll just reformat!

couple of quick tweaks that i like are very simple eg in performance settings just turn off things like shadows and fade in, makes everything much snappier!

hope this helps

p.s with making lots of changes i like to ensure that i defrag all the time (i use auslogics so i have a nice picture to look at when it defrags - http://www.download.com/Auslogics-Disk-Defrag/3000-2086-10567503.html ) and do a registry clean using ccleaner or microsoft's online scanner - http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm?s_cid=sah/?s_cid=sah (awesome as a reg cleaner - just customize it so i only check reg), i also use Ad-aware and check my comp every so often for viruses using prevx2.0 - http://www.prevx.com/ (found 3 malware the 1st time i used it, avast didn't find any, tut tut avast )

i've found that by doing this my computer couldn't be any faster eg after reboot when click to start an application i have no waiting time for any program, except itunes which takes 2 secs to load and live messenger which takes just less than 1

 

Thanks for those links man! Repped!

Edit.

After all this tweaking and stuff, I still have 57 processes and 43%+ memory usage. Bummer.

 

here is a screenshot of my services:

 

^Wow. I have many, many, many services disabled. And I see you have most of your services on automatic.

Yet you only have around 39 processes running?

Weird..

 

when i took that i had messenger running, itunes and skype, probably would have been wise to take the screen shot after a clean reboot, it's late where i am, not thinkin straight

 

ok so i rebooted and these are my processes, well as many as i can fit on.

with the services just discard any that look like programs!

god knows how low it would be if i turned off aero and indexing! lol

its taken me a while to tweak it to this point. also, it depends on what anti virus u r running, that alone can account for up to 5 processes.

 

I have AVG. Without it running, I still have around 56+ processes. Ands that IDLED!

 

Look, these are all my processes running right now...




And as you can see, thats just ridiculous...

Look at how many more processes you seem to be running and compare your screenshot to mine. Absolutely absurd. I dont even think there are 59 processes running there in that screenshot!

I have to find a way to trim it down.


Edit:

Also, how come I don't see my svchost.exe processes?

 

i think where your problem might lie is that you are not even able to view all your processes. for one you haven't clicked on show processes for all users, and secondly, i would strongly advise you turn UAC off. this will give u full and uninhibited control of vista. UAC is pretty much useless in my opinion, turning it off solved many problems for me.

it is really simple to do and it's all in the vista forum links that i gave you. the easiest way however is to go to control panel - user accounts and family safety - user accounts - turn on/off user account control - turn it off. restart and voila!!

 

You shouldn't turn UAC off unless you have to.

And I don't want to rain on your parade, but the number of processes doesn't really mean anything. Most of them don't take CPU time, they're just loaded into memory (and if they aren't used while you're gaming, they get pushed to the pagefile so they don't even take up RAM in low-resource situations) and wait for the right time to kick into action.

In other words, it doesn't really matter how many processes are running.
(If you have an extreme number of 3rd party services, it might be a symptom (note, a symptom, not the cause) of a problem, but all the ones that come with Vista are part of the OS, and there isn't a big problem in having them running (because almost all of them are special-purpose stuff that doesn't normally take any CPU time. They just wait.

 

jalf - i do agree with u in terms of the principle that ram is there for a purpose and if it is not being used then it is wasted. purely from experience have i found that reducing the number of processes does in fact increase the responsiveness of my system.

for most people however, i would just advise defragmenting and cleaning up the registry REGULARLY!

the most important thing is to ensure that 3rd party software is disabled if it's not in use because that probably doesn't sit dormant like OS processes.

im terms of UAC, there are both arguments for and against its use. personally, it isn't missed. for instance, i found that by disabling it many issues were solved, ones that wern't obvious ie: object dock wouldn't minimise programs properly until i disabled it! could be a simple conflict, but still, im better off without it!

plus, i think for many people it leads to confusion, ie: blackmamba's confusion as to why he has 59 processes running but only 15 or so are visible.

 

Alright Cahoole, this is the best I could get it down to. Some of the Vaio stuff, I hardly ever use so I disabled some of those services. My AVG virus protection, I would do all that stuff manually, so I set it to manual.

And this what I got it down to so far...



So as you can see, 49ish. Okay I guess...

Those task schedulers, are those really necessary services? I'm pretty sure I set all those tasks to be run automatically on manual. Why are they still there then?

 

i think 49 is ok, its hardly even that important, but obviously like me u just feel comforted in the thought that your machine is only doing what u want it to, hahaha.

ok so the only non essential processes that i can see are:

apmsgfwd (don't know what this is)
all the media center processes (i dont use it so it's off)
sql processes (only necessary for microsoft sql browser)

that's about it, seems like your intel graphics card uses a few processes and vaio also.

 

What the heck is a microsoft sql browser?

You sure I can end all of those sql processes?