RAM Usage Went Up

[Extreme112]

My Ram usage has gone from 30% when idle, to 50% when Idle. The Only thing I remember doing is increasing my hard disk cache and setting affinity of certain games. Could this be why it's increased?

Running Vista with 4GB RAM, Quad Core Processor.

 

[carnageX]

Well what's using all the RAM? Have you opened task manager and/or resource monitor (if Vista/Win7) and checked to see what's taking up most of the RAM?

 

[Extreme112]

Well I dont know how to interpret resource monitor and I can't print screen for some reason but, aside from by browser, which uses around 100,000 K
dwm.exe uses 45,000 K,
explorer.exe uses 17,800 K,
iTunesHelper.exe uses 13,000 K,
sidebar.exe uses 15,000 K

There were taken from Memory(Private Networking Set) Under Processes in Task Manager. All other processes use less than 10,000 K.
I have 101 active processes

 

[carnageX]

Did you click the "show all processes from all users" button on task manager?

I would try to get your print screen working and take a screenshot of task manager and resource monitor so we can have a look.

 

[Extreme112]

Here the prints screens from all users. Sorry if its a little blurry,

 

[carnageX]

It would be easier to see what's taking up more memory if you sorted by the Memory column (click it to sort from largest to smallest).

 

[Extreme112]

Heres a hopefully better one.

 

[Lexluethar]

Also keep in mind at idle times Vista and 7 take advantage of unused RAM to cache frequently used programs.

 

[Extreme112]

I don't mind Vista using half my ram when its idle, its just that I'm worried I won't be able to play my CPU and RAM intensive games anymore.

Though I read somewhere if you do use intensive applications, Vista will free up ram so you can play your intensive games. Is this true?

 

[carnageX]

Yes that's true. That's how prefetch and superfetch in Vista/7 work. It pre-loads frequently used programs, and if another application needs that memory, it frees it.