Hello everyone

I'm running Vista 64 on my new build...
I was surprised to find out that Vista eats up up to 1GB of RAM...(out of 4GB)



861MB while running just the OS and nothing else...I don't even have an antivirus installed yet...

Am I doing something wrong?

Vista employs Superfetch which is a more intellegent, more efficient way of utalizing system memory than XP (if you are comparing the two in your initial question). This article may give some insight. I am using 1.9 GB of my 8GB as I write this and at the moment I am basically just browsing the net. So, no your memory usage in not errant.


http://www.anandtech.com/systems/s [...] i=2917&p=4

Vista has a feature called Superfetch, which pre-loads into memory start up files for applications it thinks you will use. This is the reason for higher usage. Basicaly, it's XP's pre-fetch on some serious steroids, and is intelligent enough, that over time, it will learn what you use and when.

Memory used in this fashion is surrendered to active programs just as if it were empty.


http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 532-6.html

I disabled superfetch and yet Vista eats up almost the same amount of RAM (100MB less) as with Superfetch on...

Not sure what to tell you but I have a friend with 1 gig of RAM on a vista home premium laptop, using shared video RAM! with aero enabled! and a whole bunch of apps running, quite snappily too and he still has a nice chunk of ram leftover. So how do you explain that?

I'm guessing even if superfetch is turned off your system is still caching code in RAM, perhaps just not as intelligently or aggressively as superfetch?

XP uses less ram, to a degree, this makes sense, it was designed nearly a decade ago to run on systems with as little as 128 meg, or less ram. I have 8 gig of ram now and I'm happy to let the OS use it so long as its doing something,

start type msconfig enter clear everything in the startup section bar ut antivirus/internet security progs u should see a drop in ram usage

So, my 2 gig mem system is OK for VISTA or not?

I see a few 1 gig mem systems sold with VISTA........

I'd really like to upgrade to 64 bit and DIRECTX 10/11

Two gigs works fine with Vista 64, but the performance increase is noticable going to 4 gigs then 8 gigs. Depends on what function you are doing within your system.

What are your system specifications, MB, CPU, video care, RAM etc. You should do well with Vista 64 especially if you have a recent, modern system.

I see your 'Config' now. Check the product page of your Intel 945 MB for Vista 64 drivers available. The newer Intel chipsets P35, P45, etc. are good to go with Vista 64.

Badge,

ty, I might just upgrade to Vista..............