Weird Vista Disk Thrashing

I disabled indexing and search in Vista Premium on my Vostro 1500:

T5270
4GB Ram
160 HDD 5400RPM
8400m GS

So here's the problem. Vista caches in normally about 1.7GB into memory. The last couple of days it cached in 3.5GB and left me with around 68MB of free space. Again no biggie, I don't care.

Here's where it gets real screwy. All of a sudden Vista frees up 1.5GB of ram. If I do something simple like open media player or any type of program on my laptop Vista takes back the 1.5GB of free space. Rinse, Repeat.

After a while I foresee some major wear and tear on the hard drive if this keeps up. If I were to disable Superfetch and ReadyBoost in my services would this stop all the disk thrashing?

I'm in the process of reinstalling Vista after a complete format to see if the problem comes back again.

Any thoughts from the geniuses as to why this may have happened?

 

To let you know, by brother got a hp desktop recently with vista home premium, and it's RAM usage is only 350 MB under idling. My laptop uses 650MB atleast. I don't care about this and the disk thrashing with vista. I didn't disable anything.

 

Thats how Vista's memory usage works; according to the principle that unused RAM is wasted RAM, it will cache as much as it can. But, when your applications request a chunk of memory, Vista will dump part of the cache for you. Reinstalling won't do anything. Also, there is no evidence that Vista's disk usage habits cause HD failure, so I don't think you should be worried.

 

The only thing that bothers me is the constant loading and unloading of 1.5GB of ram on a frequent basis.

 

HDDs are meant for long usage, there shouldn't be any problems on that.

 

Thanks i'll keep that in mind.