Vista eats my RAM

[Guest]

Hi all,

I'm running Vista RC1 on a PC with an Athlon XP 2GB chip and 512MB RAM.
These specs more than meet the minimum needed for Vista, yet running only the
operating system (literally nothing other than Windows's own processes) takes
up over 300MB of my RAM. And thats when it's sitting there not doing anything.

I'm already getting another 512MB RAM stick for my PC, but is there anything
else that can be done to optimize Vista and free up some more memory?

 

[Mark W Scheidell]

Vista uses a different memory management than XP. Don't worry about how
much it reports as being in use. Vista will use as much memory as you throw
at it, but it will also release what it as cached much better than XP.

That being said you should still go ahead with getting the additional RAM.
You'll find that Vista runs better on 1 GB than it does on 512mb.

 

[Guest]

In that case, how come I get tons of lag when I play games? It's always
loading lag, never graphics or connection lag. These games worked fine under
XP, and would work fine on Vista if it wasn't for this loading lag I get
constantly.

Thanks for your response Mark,
Bort

 

[Richard Urban]

You need sufficient RAM to load, and hold the graphics files for the game
you are playing. Look to the readme file, or the outside of the box, to find
out what the minimum recommendations are. Then, believe them. Many newer
game load massive files into memory. 512 meg of RAM just may not cut it.

--

Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Guest]

You know, it is Windows, it eats memory raw. Just give it what it wants, its
cheap these days and you will do yourself a big pleasure with it as well.
Put in as much as you can. Right now i have one gig and it uses 850mb. Still
it is very fast. If i have XP running with 850mb in use, with every click on
the mouse i can get a cup of coffee.

Anyway, you get the point.

Franky

 

[skon]

I didn't know that anyone had that little RAM any more. I'm running on 6GB
and have had a minumum of 2GB (and 4GB on most) on every system I've used
the last 6 years or so. RAM is dirt cheap and has been for a long time, why
suffer through the agony of Windows on anything less then 2GB?

Regards,
Skon

 

[niknik1971]

What OS uses 6GB of ram

Or may I rephrase it "What OS can utilize 6GB of ram?"

NIK

 

[Guest]

No kidding! I'm surprised! (just kidding!)

Vista will use up everything that you can throw at it. Hardware development
doesn't seem to have caught up with it yet.

I'd suggest that you adjust your display properties downward, and then use
the Control Panel...System applet to adjust your PC for performance. Turning
off the Aero theme should also help.

- John

 

[Guest]

Oops - didn't see the rest of the post!

While there are "minimums" recommended for the use of Vista, I've found that
it will run quite well on only 512 mB of RAM (a bit slow - but not
excruciatingly so) if you do the "tweaks" required to optimize the system for
performance.

Since Vista is a huge leap forward for graphics, it makes sense that
adjusting the graphics stuff downwards will help keep your RAM free. In
particular the areas that I mentioned in my previous post will help (I used
them on a Toshiba M45 laptop with 512 mB of RAM back in June).

Also, keep an eye on your startups and on your running processes. Trimming
them back will save on memory usage. You may have to eliminate some of the
"eye candy" (such as the Sidebar), but the performance increase will make
your experience much easier to deal with.

FWIW - I've got a P4 3.0 gHz system with a nVidia 7800 GS vid card and 2 gB
of RAM - and Vista doesn't like the processor or the vid card (even though it
works well). So, I'm shopping for new chipsets (975x or 680i SLI) for my new
Core 2 Duo system.

- John

 

[Robert Judge]

I have the same setup AthlonXP 2600 and 512 RAM and Vista is using 311mb of
my 512 mb just sitting idle.
I'm not sure 1gig will be enough. everything is super slow and forget about
any 3D apps.

 

[HDFatBoy2003]

Vista is going to cache as much as it can into your physical RAM. I have
6GB and Vista normally caches 3GB but only shows 1.5GB free. Sometimes I
even get down to just a little over 100MB but performance has never been
impacted and I often work on video and audio projects. I'm actually finding
Vista x64 to be better at memory management than XP x64. Don't worry that
much about the amount of free memory being reported by Vista. Vista will
make memory available as your applications request it. Vista is trying to
anticipate what files it thinks you'll want.

Bottom line 512mb really isn't enough RAM. I'd say 1 GB is bottom line to
get reasonable performance and 2 GB would be optimum for a casual user.

 

[Guest]

I have a desktop, so I disabled a few services, like Tablet PC, and changed
the desktop settings from Best Appearance to Best Performance, turned off
indexing service, disabled offline files, and turned the taskbar UI to
classic. I have 1 GB of RAM, and I'm currently averaging 52% usage. Granted,
I have Office 2007 Beta and Trend PC-cillin Internet Security suite 14
installed.

I'm planning on using 2 GB as the standard RAM for my OS's desktops, because
I'ts my experience out of the box - you're looking at roughly 512 MB for the
OS, which didn't leave much for my Games.

--
Good Sites to know:
http://www.sysinternals.com
http://www.eventid.net
http://www.microsoft.com/technet
http://www.isaserver.org
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder

 

[zr1]

I would ask for some specifics on the lag as gaming can request a whole host
of needs from your system:
* How does the lag appear?
* Online or single player gaming? Connection? (which will vary by
instance/server/etc.)
* Video card specs (chipset and memory)
* Specific games(s) as some of them are brutal
* The Athlon 2000+ is/was a great little chip. Your 512MB is likely PC2100
* Depending on the game, you may have to turn down tons of eye candy while
others shouldn't be a problem. Far Cry or FlightSimX would probably have
your system on its knees while Rainbow 6 or Need for Speed 3 should click
right along.

With that said, Vista appears to really like the RAM. I wouldn't recommend
less than 1GB. On this system running 1.5GB this install seems to report
400-600MB in use before adding on more applications.

 

[John Smith]

skon pisze:

I didn't know that anyone had that little RAM any more. I'm running on
6GB and have had a minumum of 2GB (and 4GB on most) on every system I've
used the last 6 years or so. RAM is dirt cheap and has been for a long
time, why suffer through the agony of Windows on anything less then 2GB?

Just because in some cases you don't have money for buy it? Is it good
reason?