84% Physical Memory usage?

[theafterglow]

OK - I know my system specs aren't brilliant with only 1Gb RAM, however didn't think when I bought the laptop with Vista Home SP1 I'd be clocking around 850Mb with only IE open!

Is there a reason it's so high or is it just the way it is these days with all this glitzy new software? Should I have gone for a better spec?

 

[woody1191]

I think people normally advise to run Vista with at least 2gb of RAM for it to run quite well. I don't have Vista myself but i would assume it's probably taking nearly 75% of the RAM just to run the operating system and its essential processes.
IE wouldn't take much of your Laptops' resources to run.

What is your CPU clock speed?

 

[SNGX1275]

Vista handles RAM differently than XP. Wouldn't you rather have more physical RAM usage and less paged? Superfetch learns what programs you typically load, and preloads some of that into RAM to decrease the time to open.

Plus, what is the point of having a lot of RAM if you aren't going to use it. People always freak out when they see a high usage of physical, thats what you should want to see.

Having said that, Vista will perform better with 2Gigs, but its still going to keep eating away at your physical RAM because thats what its designed to do.

Reboot your computer, fire up task manager, and then don't do anything except watch your physical RAM usage, it will keep going up for a while after the OS has completely loaded.