Lower Ram usage in Windows 10?

I finally got around to using windows 10. I've used it some times before but hated it and never used it long, I only did some term trial usage with windows 10, but now i'm using it long term. I installed the windows 10 education version, and i was surprised at how much junk and useless crap there was and it's annoying to disable everything. Anyway , i have 3 computers, 1 laptop running windows xp (which is my main computer), one laptop running windows 7, and this game desktop running windows 10.

how can i lower the RAM usage of windows 10? On my windows xp, with nothing running and after some adjustment turning off background apps, my ram usage hovers 350mb-420mb. ON windows 7, when i first got it, it was running around 900mb-1gb but with some adjustment, i got ram usage to hover at 650mb-800mb at idle with nothing really running. BUT WINDOWS 10, even after turning off apps and features like windows search and update, my ram usage at idle with no programs opened is 1.8gb-2.gb!!

ridiculous, how can i lower ram usage more from what i already did? Windows 10 is such a system resource hog. Kubuntu 18.04 only runs at 500mb ram usage idle, on this same desktop

 

Might want to look at the nobloatware iso that a few members made here and there is also the shut up 10 portable app you can find here too.

Linux generally runs leaner than windows but I only dabbled in a couple in the past. Is that not a norm anymore?

 

Nope, that was the myth that linux runs leaner than windows, even back in the windows 7 and xp days they said that, but i've tried bunch of mainstream linux distro like ubuntu, etc in those days, and they all used more RAM than windows xp. And not only that, none of them were smooth like xp.
I'm pretty surprised at how little ram usage and how smooth kubuntu 18.04 ran. But maybe that's because i used it on this game desktop PC, and not my main laptop, which is 10 years old (inspiron 1520). Cause running on 10 yr old hardware, you can really see how fast/smooth and efficient an OS really is. running on newer hardware won't let you know that cause newer hardware are so fast these days, you would barely feel any hiccups.

Windows 10 runs smooth on this gaming PC, but i'm just OCD and i don't like high ram usage for no reason. I just read that shut up 10 portable, but is it trustable?

 

Xp was terrible for me but I was also young back then.

My windows 7 machine runs about 4GB daily but it's also my Torrent / plex box. My windows 10 isn't as lean.

Shut up 10 works but you have to reapply your settings after an update as windows will turn them back on

 

Mines at 2.2-3 GB at idle, with 32GB Ram in my laptop. A lot of that is caching drivers, commonly used programs etc to accelerate those so it will use a nice amount of available memory even if nothing is opened. If you disable or keep page file to a very small amount, you may notice more RAM use as well as it no longer keeps less used stuff on disk cache but in RAM. I wouldn’t really worry about free RAM it will free up ram when needed it’s probably working as intended.

It used to be the same complaint with Android and people actively clearing RAM so they could see more free RAM when that was actually detrimental as it meant commonly used apps had to completely reload meaning slower loading and actually used more battery in the process.

 

i followed the "windows 10 clean installation guide" on here and while turn off most of the settings he recommended didn't do anything. turning off bitdefender and all it's services dropped my idle ram usage down 1.4GB - 1.5GB. which is a decent improvement. It's still twice as much as windows 7, ram usage, but it's good enough

 

I'm sitting at 4.5GB Ram usage but this isnt idle. 4 Tabs in Waterfox, Plex media player and chrome remote desktop.

Android had bad I/O 5.1.1 which crippled my nexus 7 2012. Much better now with 7.1.2

 

@ lucirz, not sure of your complete setup but I use Windows 10x64 Pro 1803 and have no bloatware the likes your talking about. Educational is suppose to be bloatwareless version so I think you got something else going on here. Also to run W10 you should be at least Ryzen or i3 or starting i5 to have the benefits of W10 and having much RAM as possible helps. I got 16gig if I recall and still have 12gigs left so for you to run so short something else is the cause of this. And I got what I needed installed no bloatware running. So if you running short all the time maybe a computer shop needs to look and find why the cause.

 

Windows 8.1 uses less ram than 7 mostly cause it lacks aero.
Windows 10 has been heinously painful for me and I only used it for a day now. Thinking about going back to W7