windows 7 and pc usage

O

Owskie

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 13, 2003
Messages
456
I just built my computer 4 gigs of g. skill ram, and installed the 64 bit version of windows 7

my monitors say that i have 20% usage of RAM being used, when just idling, what could be causing this?
 
"high" is relative... it depends what programs you have running when your computer is "idling"

reboot it and wait 5 min... then look at utilization

run a dozen different programs, close everything, then look at utilization again... it will be higher

Windows has a lot of caching in the background
 
Owskie said:
22% running nothing but the internet here
Click to expand...
That's normal. Vista and 7 use the free memory to have programs pre-loaded and cached up, ready to launch.

It's absolutely fine, stop worrying about it. I'd prefer 100% used because that way I'm using what I pay for. It automatically frees up ram for any program that needs more.
 
Read this again:

bigdogchris said:
That's normal. Vista and 7 use the free memory to have programs pre-loaded and cached up, ready to launch.

It's absolutely fine, stop worrying about it. I'd prefer 100% used because that way I'm using what I pay for. It automatically frees up ram for any program that needs more.
Click to expand...

There is no problem.
 
Really, these threads make me wanna beat the OP's with sticks of ram.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
OP, repeat after me: Unused RAM is Wasted Performance. Unused RAM is Wasted Performance. Unused RAM is Wasted Performance.
 
Arainach said:
OP, repeat after me: Unused RAM is Wasted Performance. Unused RAM is Wasted Performance. Unused RAM is Wasted Performance.
Click to expand...

Add to that...Unused RAM is wasted money...unused RAM is wasted money, unused RAM is wasted money!

Maybe the OP should remove 2 gigs of RAM! :rolleyes:

First lesson of the day...RAM is faster than your hard drive! Lets start there!
 
Yeah Gusphin, I've been successfully trolling hard forums for 6.2 years. Forgive me for not knowing everything about PC's. I didn't realize this forum was for people on pedestals.
 
Owski, I think you are missing the point. Since you have been around for 6.2 years, you most likely saw the countless threads about memory usage once Vista was released three years ago.

Now, let's say you skipped Vista and just recently went from XP to Windows 7. You had to have done some reading about Windows 7 to see what it offered you, in order to convince you to buy it and install it, right? Surely memory management was one of those features.

Now let's assume none of those are true. Would you buy a fast sports car, only to idle around town, going as slow as possible, so you could use as little of the horsepower as possible? Would you buy a nice sized grill, only to cook on a very small section?

If the computer uses that memory for better performance....then let it. That's one of the reasons why so many of us went to Vista when it was released, and then went to Windows 7 this year.
 
I built my last PC when XP was around, I haven't touched hardware or any new OS since then, nor read up on any of it until recently. It has been like starting over.

I understand the logic, it makes sense, I was just suprised how much an idle windows 7 took up
 
Open the resource monitor and what do you see?
This will show you whats going where in your system.

ResourceMonitor.jpg
 
Did you disable the page file by chance? When I was running without a page file, Win 7 was using about 4-5 GBs of Ram, when I enabled the page file it went down to about 1.3-1.6 GBs of Ram (out of 12GBs), so Windows keeps a lot of things in memory that it thinks you'll need, and they get paged out if you don't use them for a while, so make sure you have a large enough page file (at least 1x ram size.) Also, the more memory you have, the more it uses I think, to help performance which is a good thing.
 
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