More than 600MB RAM uses at Windows 7 startup

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shoeseat

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how much RAM do windows 7 take at start up?When i check task manager the physical memory uses is more than 600MB.Isn't this too high?I don't have too much start up program either.I have msi afterburner,microsoft security essentials,audio controller.That's it.Also the CPU uses is only 1-2%.MSE shows no virus.

I have 2GB of ram.Just wanted to know whether it's normal or am i having problem?
 
It's a pretty normal memory usage figure. Amongst other things, Windows 7 (& Vista for that matter) use quite a bit of memory to pre-load your most-used applications so that they can launch faster.

The CPU figure is quite normal as well. You don't need to have applications running to have your CPU occupied as the OS itself is an application & is constantly running.
 
I've been testing/using 7 for quite a while; and my observation is that usually memory usage with 2 GB, 3GB, and 6 GB (well atleast these are the configurations i use almost daily i.e. workpc-notebook-homepc) is around 30-35% of the total available physical memory. Even on the system with least ram i never had any problems so far. Yesterday, just for the heck of it, I brought back from the dead an old P4 2.6 (Northwood) with 1 GB and installed 7x64 on it; and even that looks pretty much alright while running productivity applications/firefox etc./and even light usage of ACAD.
 
wow mine too use around 30-35%.I was just curious to know if this is happening due to some unnecessary programs.It seems like the part of win7 memory management.Anyway guys thankx for the help.Have a good year ahead.
 
Archean said:
Yesterday, just for the heck of it, I brought back from the dead an old P4 2.6 (Northwood) with 1 GB and installed 7x64 on it; and even that looks pretty much alright while running productivity applications/firefox etc./and even light usage of ACAD.
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Are you serious? that is not possible! if that was, then I'd be able play any games on XP making them run atleast 60fps! hehehe! Without Vsync of course, I don't like them!
 
600MB is fine,i installed 7 ultimate on a old AMD 2100+ with only 640MB's and it plays movies fine wouldn't use it for games though.

30 to 35% seems like a lot,mine after start-up use's about 26% then settle's to about 21\22%,i have seen it go as low as 19%,i am using 4gb's of ram.
 
Absolutely serious ! :)

As BMf said ........ I wouldn't want to use it for any gaming .... not even for casual ones
 
BMfan said:
600MB is fine,i installed 7 ultimate on a old AMD 2100+ with only 640MB's and it plays movies fine wouldn't use it for games though.
Click to expand...

BMfan said:
30 to 35% seems like a lot,mine after start-up use's about 26% then settle's to about 21\22%,i have seen it go as low as 19%,i am using 4gb's of ram.
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Damn.... that's pretty good!

Ha 35%, XP can get as low as 20%! or more! 98 even lower!

and that's why I prefer XP than VISTA and 7.....*sigh*
 
GN48 said:
Ha 35%, XP can get as low as 20%! or more! 98 even lower!

and that's why I prefer XP than VISTA and 7.....*sigh*
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The reason why it use's so much is because when people install everything they never stop things from running in the background.So they have an extra 10/15 processes running that don't have to.

At the moment while in firefox and running about 3 other apps i need to run i am only using 26%,after start-up it settles to about 18%.
 
GN48 said:
Damn.... that's pretty good!

Ha 35%, XP can get as low as 20%! or more! 98 even lower!

and that's why I prefer XP than VISTA and 7.....*sigh*
Click to expand...

I don't think you understand what VISTA and 7 are doing. Try reading this to help:
http://www.windows7hacker.com/index.php/2009/12/why-you-should-not-disable-superfetch-in-windows-7/

Basically XP is bad at caching effectively. This is a BAD thing, not a GOOD thing. MS didn't do a good job of selling this with Vista as they didn't update their system monitor to display the difference between "used" and "available" memory - Win 7 fixes this. Vista and Win7 use much more memory to preload common applications that you use to improve response time. This memory though is flagged as available to be dumped if you load another program that needs it that is not already pre-loaded (ie a cache miss). There is a very small penalty for a cache miss, but it is far offset by the benefit you get out of having a cache hit when you start an application that already has been partial pre-loaded.
 
compdata said:
I don't think you understand what VISTA and 7 are doing. Try reading this to help:
http://www.windows7hacker.com/index.php/2009/12/why-you-should-not-disable-superfetch-in-windows-7/.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that :)

If this is what VISTA and 7 trying to do, then how come some of the programs I have on my XP computer that I also have on VISTA run faster? So what I'm saying is that, XP loads thing faster, apparently and VISTA just lacks along as if it's half asleep! 7 corrected this problem, I guess. But this doesn't mean everyones going to turn to 7, XP is still in-date and working, is not out dated yet, Most of the game that works on XP don't work in 7, if you didn't know... So yeah, I'm going to stick with XP for a few more years, until I am satisfy with 7. You can't make me, muahahaha! Just like one of my friends, he tried to convince me to get VISTA! He said it was all good, much better than XP, guess what, he was wrong, VISTA's an absolute rip off! Once I got it.... Besides the fact it uses more memory than XP, it lacked the ability to play some light games. Such games that don't lag. Can't even play Diablo I for crying out loud, and I used to like play that all the time on my XP computer! So, here goes, VISTA to me, is a no no for games, even casual ones! VISTA to me, is more like for businesses and such.

So thanks anyway for that, but I'm still with XP!
 
I ran vista from before sp1 and after and any game i tried to play including COD played,if you tried vista with 1gb of ram then that was part of the problem.
Microsoft said 1gb was sufficient but they were wrong as usual.
Proof that 7 is much better than vista is the fact that the machine that i put 7 on with 640MB of ram wouldn't run vista properly,so i put xp on it at the time(so xp does have it's purposes).
 
If you have an older machine i am not going to argue with the fact that XP will "run" faster on it. Vista and Win 7 do provide a lot more features and eye candy that is really meant to be run on a newer machine. While some people may complain about this, it is very logical to provide more features and "use" more of your expensive fast computer rather. It would be nice if it did scale better though (Win 7 is definitely better for older hardware then Vista as they did spend more time optimizing processor and memory usage).

My point about the caching still stands though, and if XP did a better job of caching it would be much faster then it is.
 
GN48 said:
Thanks for that :)

If this is what VISTA and 7 trying to do, then how come some of the programs I have on my XP computer that I also have on VISTA run faster? So what I'm saying is that, XP loads thing faster, apparently and VISTA just lacks along as if it's half asleep! 7 corrected this problem, I guess. But this doesn't mean everyones going to turn to 7, XP is still in-date and working, is not out dated yet, Most of the game that works on XP don't work in 7, if you didn't know... So yeah, I'm going to stick with XP for a few more years, until I am satisfy with 7. You can't make me, muahahaha! Just like one of my friends, he tried to convince me to get VISTA! He said it was all good, much better than XP, guess what, he was wrong, VISTA's an absolute rip off! Once I got it.... Besides the fact it uses more memory than XP, it lacked the ability to play some light games. Such games that don't lag. Can't even play Diablo I for crying out loud, and I used to like play that all the time on my XP computer! So, here goes, VISTA to me, is a no no for games, even casual ones! VISTA to me, is more like for businesses and such.

So thanks anyway for that, but I'm still with XP!
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Feel free to stick with XP as long as you want :) MS is going to begin dropping support for XP starting this year. http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&C2=1173 Not saying i am happy about this, but you are going to loose security updates and more and more companies are going to not test on XP as time goes along. You should be fine with XP for a couple years at least though.

Basically i would recommend sticking with XP on your old computer and upgrading to Win 7 at your next computer upgrade/purchase. You can pray that www.gog.com has added diablo to their list of games they offer by then too ;-)
 
compdata said:
Feel free to stick with XP as long as you want :) MS is going to begin dropping support for XP starting this year. http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&C2=1173 Not saying i am happy about this, but you are going to loose security updates and more and more companies are going to not test on XP as time goes along. You should be fine with XP for a couple years at least though.

Basically i would recommend sticking with XP on your old computer and upgrading to Win 7 at your next computer upgrade/purchase. You can pray that www.gog.com has added diablo to their list of games they offer by then too ;-)
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Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo..................... :dead:
 
Good advice compdata !

I'll add that "a computer should die with the OS it was borne with" .........

Unless you plan to do some major surgery during its midlife :)
 
Why XP loads stuff faster than VISTA

D..do you know why XP loads programs alot faster than either 7 and VISTA from personal experience? That's because on my VISTA running laptop it has twice the many processes running than on my XP system. That shouldn't matter anyway, My Vista computer is better, 2 times better than my XP (2x more RAM, 2x processing power, basically two times everything my XP system's got). It has twice of what my XP has. The ony thing that it hasn't got, is a graphics card, which my XP system has. Though surprisingly my VISTA running laptop has a Intel chip that has 782MB of available memory that I can't harness, damn........ must be a way to release that and then it would probably beat my XP system in terms of gaming performance i reckon.
 
Debatable....

Didou said:
It's a pretty normal memory usage figure. Amongst other things, Windows 7 (& Vista for that matter) use quite a bit of memory to pre-load your most-used applications so that they can launch faster.

The CPU figure is quite normal as well. You don't need to have applications running to have your CPU occupied as the OS itself is an application & is constantly running.
Click to expand...

You call that normal memory usage?? Ha, my VISTA laptop sucks up to 1GB to 1.5GB at startup. Now that's normal! And then it after that it drops down to about 900MB at the most. So average out memory usage; it's stuck at 1GB!

hmmm, either 7 is better memory usage than VISTA or my laptop just has to many stuff at startup.
 
I wonder how many years it will take for people to understand that the memory is there to be used. Otherwise, what's the point in having more than 600 MB of RAM?

Posted from a 12 GB RAM machine with ~50 MB free :)
 
Mictlantecuhtli said:
I wonder how many years it will take for people to understand that the memory is there to be used. Otherwise, what's the point in having more than 600 MB of RAM?

Posted from a 12 GB RAM machine with ~50 MB free :)
Click to expand...

I know it's for use, it's just these days now, computers are just using more and more RAM! Plus I would glady disable Pageing file for both my Tower and laptop if I had atleast 4GB installed for both of them, then I could use RAM directly without the HDD interfering with my programs...

But I do wonder what the RAM cap set is for XP and VISTA, anyone know?

11950MB used already?? DAMN!........ You on a server computer I'm guessing? What are you doing to your machine???
 
Mictlantecuhtli said:
I wonder how many years it will take for people to understand that the memory is there to be used. Otherwise, what's the point in having more than 600 MB of RAM?

Posted from a 12 GB RAM machine with ~50 MB free :)
Click to expand...

Dead on. It certainly is a very odd phenomenon. Tell someone their L2 cache is siting half empty and they will be upset that it isn't be utilized more, but tell someone that their main RAM is half full and they will upset that the system is using too much.

Granted that i prefer to have as few processes running as is feasible, but if windows wants to prefetch all my common apps I am all for it.
 
After few weeks of regular use (with only those applications installed i use e.g. office/firefox/email client/messenger etc.) ....... my system at uses about 20.89% or total available memory; with AVG/Commodo running in the background along with nVidia drivers & motherboard drivers, fraps etc.

My same system is configured to dual boot into xp and with same softwares its consuming about 21.98% of total ram ....... so i guess the difference is really nothing much, and only the installed software will actually determine whatever physical ram you left with for use, after booting.

Now, I've used XP for ages but its now on its death throes ..... and there where it should be; because you can't keep plugging its holes for infinity ..... I felt that I had to move on. But then again; its personal choice i guess.
 
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