Report: Most Windows 7 PCs Max Out RAM, Choke

[of the way]

So am I the only one who has a box running x64 Windows 7 on 1GB?

The only slowdowns I notice are from running things that tax the Sempron 2800+ or Nvidia 6200. I obviously don't use it for running a large number of memory intensive programs, but Windows itself runs fine.

 

[luxiphr]

[citation][nom]Yuka[/nom]And BTW; that % on your task manager gives you this (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong):memory usage / (system memory + virtual memory)So your task manager showing 50% means you're already (prolly) using 100% of your system memory (RAM).Cheers![/citation]
correcting you: at least on windows 7 it reads "physical memory" and means it!

 

[San Pedro]

Idle under 30% of my 4gb in use.

I have seen my ram usage shoot up to 99% before, but only when seeding torrents at ~9 mb/s for a few hours.

For Vista, daemon tools had a memory leak for me that would cause memory usage to steadily climb if using a mounted image, but no such problem with Win7.

 

[Guest]

See this site:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/behind-the-windows-7-memory-usage-scaremongering.ars

 

[jonpaul37]

i find this information from the researcher to be erronious.

 

[JimmiG]

Well if you prefer for all your expensive RAM to sit unused like in XP, you can just disable Superfetch...

 

[Guest]

Windows 7 pre-fetches data for frequently used apps, if another app starts up and needs memory, then the pre-fetched data gets dumped to allow the newly opened app to access it.

Barth needs to do a little research and learn the difference about the different memory pools in Win7.
Total (what it says)
Available (essentially memory in use by pre-fetch data but available if needed)
Free (unallocated to anything)

 

[Nightsilver]

That's what you get for buying a PC from Walmart with 2gb of RAM.

 

[kawininjazx]

Being a computer professional, I think the average ram for windows xp is more like 512-768mb.

I have 4GB for Win7 on my laptop, works great.

My work PC has a 2.7 core 2 duo, 2gb RAM, and a 4830 and I multitask all day and even play a little MW2 and I never have an issue. It's all the bloatware...

 

[brett1042002]

I'm sure these Win 7 systems also have retarded amounts of worthless crap running in the background too. msconfig does wonders.

 

[Camikazi]

[citation][nom]xrarey[/nom]Where is this coming from? I have 7 64-bit, 6gb ram, and NO pagefile - and even I don't get this kind of ram usage. Not even while encoding high bit-rate x264 while playing TF2 and recording a TV show...??[/citation]
I am pretty much same, x64 windows 7 8GB RAM, watching movies or TV (have TV Tuners), having Media Center recording shows (it's my DVR) have EQ open at all times, Firefox with 12 tabs, and multiple other programs and things and it rarely goes over 65% usage, well it does when I open IE and leave it open too long, it was using up 1.4GB RAM with 3 tabs open the other day.

 

[techguy911]

The only way something like this can happen is window 7 upgrade was used or they have 20 things loading up in the task bar at start up or they have more than 3 gigs of ram on 32bit version of windows 7.

I have been installing windows 7 on dozens of machines i have not seen what the article is talking about happen.

Also these machines are shipped with bloatware they need to learn how to trim all this junk out that eats your system ram which i bet is the case with their findings.

 

[Tedders]

I cruise along with 4gb with Win7 64bit and I have all my apps open with 50% memory usage. No problems here.

 

[Guest]

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/behind-the-windows-7-memory-usage-scaremongering.ars

 

[michaelzehr]

Recapping what some others have said, and adding in from my own experience:

It's GOOD if your memory usage is high, your CPU usage is high, and your disk usage is high. That's a balanced system. If one of them is high and the others low, your system isn't balanced and you could make changes (hardware, software, or configuration) to work more efficiently.

The article compares cpu usage between machines without giving work load. If the older machines have lower cpu usage than newer, and all of them are being provided work units as they are available (it sounded from the article that it might be a transaction farm of some sort, not interactive desktop usage), then the older machines are being bottlenecked by something, perhaps something that isn't being measured.

(Side note: I've performance tuned transaction billing systems for national phone companies, cramming shoving millions or even billions of work units through systems. I'm not trying to brag, merely indicating that I'm not talking about what I see on my desktop system.)

 

[ik694]

Yeah ive never seen Windows 7 hit over 50% of my ram, of course 12GB i doesn't really matter what i do. And i only hit 6GB while gaming and burning blu-rays so... Lets see some proof.

 

[dextermat]

Maybe it's just another epic fail from Microsoft....

Vista is crap : Windows 7 suffers from bad programming code past from vista

I really wonder if the developers of vista used win 98 codes and principles...

 

[hixbot]

If your system and superfetch is using 95% of your RAM, that's a good thing. It will not cause slow downs, the RAM is merely filled with data that superfecth thinks you may need. If not, it can dump RAM banks in a microsecond, giving you the free RAM you need. They quote how much RAM Win 7 is using, but do not explain how that leads to slow downs. Terrible article.

 

[Dawgsoverrebs]

i have around 70 processes running with 4gb of 1066 on a quad core at 3.2gh and the only time i ever got close to using all of it was when i was using iTunes Firefox pinnacle studio 12 and a video converter with a memory leak all at the same time

 

[RogueKitsune]

Just every day average usage for mem for me is bout 45-50%. When i fire up Company of Heroes, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, etc. I top out around 70-80%. Oh and I am running win 7 pro 64-bit with 4GB of RAM. The reason that Win7 machines on average have more mem than vista machines was that vista machines had too little and actually needed more than what they came with. This time OEMs where prepared for a more mem intensive OS and compensated by adding more RAM to systems. Also there is the fact that programs continually seem to use more and more mem the later the versions go on.

 

[jacobdrj]

I have Windows 7 Pro x64 with 8gb RAM and a q6600@stock speed and i rarely get above 30% RAM usage, with 10 gadgets, Chrome & Firefox with each 10 tabs opened, Excel & Word open and a few utilities running in the background. Only thing that 'slows it down' is when I have 2 different instances of F@H open (GPU/x86) which I run when I am out of the house...

 

[mlopinto2k1]

This is INSANITY! I run Windows 3.1 with 64MB of ram and never have any issues. Nuts I say.

 

[v1ze]

I must say my machine runs great with only 3gb of RAM (2.66ghz Intel core 2 duo) on win7 ultimate x64

 

[mranger211]

@hixbot: thank you for pointing this out. The whole purpose of things like superfetch is to fill RAM up. Empty RAM is a waste. It is beyond me how a supposedly tech firm can complain about this.

 

[killerb255]

Windows 7 Ultimate x64 here, 12 GB RAM here, never gone above 4 GB usage unless I'm running multiple virtual machines, in which I got to 9 GB (they were two Win7 VMs, one x86, the other x64, and I was testing a client's LoB app for Windows 7 compatibility).