Vista RAM

Does vista use different amounts of RAM depending on how much there is?

My vista laptop uses just under 50% when doing nothing and has 3gigs of RAM but my desktop uses also just under 50% when doing nothing and has 2 gigs of RAM. Does vista use the more RAM the more there is? Or is there another reson for the differences in RAM usage?

Public Comments

1. Yes. And this is true of all NT-derived versions of Windows (NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista), although Vista is a bit more proactive about prefetching (and this is why people think it's a "memory hog"). And all other modern virtual memory OSs too (MacOS, Linux, BSD, etc. However the amount of "RAM used" is misleading. The "RAM used" does not mean there is a permanent commitment to the present uses. If something else needs the RAM, things that are "using" it now can be trimmed back and give it up very quickly. In the case of the file cache, the RAM used by prefetched file data can be released for other use just as quickly as if the prefetching had not happened at all. So a lot more RAM is really available to, say, a new app, or to meet a sudden need by an already-running app, than you might think. edit - Windows Sidebar? Nah. At the moment, in my 8 GB (Vista x64) machine here, Sidebar is using all of 30 MB RAM. Granted I have no gadgets except the default MSN news thing. This is the "Working set (memory)" column in Task Manager - used to be called "Mem usage". The biggest memory user in Vista that you can easily do without is dwm.exe, the "desktop window manager". You get rid of this by disabling Aero. This loses you the transparency at the edges of windows, the live windows displays in "cool task switching" (alt-tab) and in the taskbar, etc. Even so, though, dwm.exe is like nearly everything else - it's only allowed to bloat when there's plenty of free RAM to bloat into. If something else starts up and needs some RAM, dwm.exe and everything else get trimmed back to make room.