Minimum ram usage 32 bit win 7

[paragonusa]

I disabled many services I didn't need and tweaked the OS using common sense.

I try to keep as many things not running as possible.What is your ram usage? :)

[Paixao]

What's the point?

[acnpt]

Mine, 64-bit with a couple apps running :shiftyninja:

Cool, eh?......I didn't think so either.

[KyleGM]

Running 2 instances of Chrome, Media player, Paint, WLM, Photo Gallery, utorrent, Last.fm, CPU monitor and my G15 Applet manager :rofl:

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[Xilo]

I would say 2GB. Anything less and you're verging on the painful, I want to kick this thing into the ground kind of experience.

[yxz]

[hdood]

I've had it under 200MB. On the systems I actually use, I don't give a damn. I have better things to do than obsess over a few megabytes here and there that just doesn't affect me.

[deactivated01032015]

One thing that probably consumes most of the RAM is Superfetch. But it's not really wise to disable it since speed boost in starting an application is quite noticeable.

[Zain Adeel]

25% of 2gb here........

[WHS]

Does anybody care how much RAM is used. I assume it's all paid for. So why skimp on it. I would be more worried if I got hard page faults.

[x-byte]

Ehh.. what's the point? RAM is supposed to be used as much as possible to speed up the system.

[+Advancer Subscriber²]

I thought this mindset was something of the past - there is no point having as much as free RAM as possible - why have 4GB RAM if you only use some bytes. Win 7 is smart enough to know how to use the RAM efficiently.

[bryonhowley]

I disabled many services I didn't need and tweaked the OS using common sense.

I try to keep as many things not running as possible.What is your ram usage? :)

The only thing you have done is make Windows 7 look like Windows 98! Windows 7 is very good about managing it memory needs there is no need what so ever to "tweak" it.

[Sikh]

What everyone said. Windows 7 isnt a Hog. The idea of Vista was to use memory efficiently, honestly it failed, but it was Microsoft first attempt at many new things(superfetch, prefetch, somethingfetch lol).

In Windows 7 they refined all those and made it much better. Which is why I gladly jumped to 7 2 months ago from XP. The minimum ive seen on my 64 bit Ultimate installation 4 gigs was 867 megs. Thats with just windows, Logitech Setpoint, Steam, and Kaspersky loaded as startup defaults. I find this essential as Setpoint controls my mouse and keyboard, specifically mouse buttons. Steam because well its steam ha. Kaspersky Internet Security because it protects my puter from stupid things.

Other then that, the most of seen it at was recently 98%. Found a very interesting memory bug, where my ram went from 42% and just kept climbing. Until it hit 98 and I was getting afraid my system would get unresponsive. It was starting to. So i closed everything including steam, setpoint, kaspersky. Ram was still there, but task manager showed roughly 600 megs in processes. So I was stumped. I opened a random app, which happened to be chrome. I click on it, chrome opened, i loaded a page, closed it and all of a sudden my ram went from 98 to 24%. I was VERY surprised at this memory bug. I DID report it to microsoft, but I also am gonna make video proof because it was Very weird. It wasnt a memory leak in an app as I use the same apps everyday all day while on the computer. It was just a trigger that got set the wrong way I guess.

Anyway, lowest memory usage on 4gigs was roughly 22-24% with said 'defaults' open. With everything else like xfire, hwmonitor, trillian, task manager, opera(48 tabs), rocketdock. My usage goes to 38%. Not bad as The highest ive seen was 58% and that was while playing BC2, PR, BF2, COD4. When playing CSS/TF2/L4D2 i see about 42-43% memory increase.

So windows 7 has been a big improvement and so far I approve of it, and NO it WAS NOT my IDEA ;).

[hdood]

Ehh.. what's the point? RAM is supposed to be used as much as possible to speed up the system.

To be fair, you cannot make the blanket statement that using more memory is better. It is only true for memory that is being used for things like caching, buffering, overgenerous allocations and so on. These are performance-enhancing features, and the memory they use can often be made available to others that need it more with very little overhead. This is something you want.

This isn't the only type of memory use though, even though a lot of people on Neowin seem to believe so. Windows also actually uses a sizable portion of memory. This is memory that is being used for things, memory that cannot be released on-demand when it's needed more elsewhere (well, not without writing the pages to the page file, which is not cheap.)

Memory Windows uses for a feature you never use is essentially wasted memory. This holds true for the memory used by the services that you never use, as an example. Disabling these will give you more usable memory. The problem, of course, is knowing what can be safely disabled. You may think you know what (say) a certain service does, but you may not really understand it, and you may not understand what other parts of the system depend on it. Disabling it could end up inadvertently disabling or reducing the performance of some other feature.

Generally speaking, experimenting with this could be more trouble than it's worth for the average user and is not advisable. If, on the other hand, you are reasonably competent and are trying to achieve a certain goal (like making it run on a P3 with 512MB of RAM), then this kind of tweaking is a reasonable thing to do.

[Roger H. Veteran]

OK hdood has a point but still, i got 4GB of RAM in my system and if Windows 7 could put everything i use in RAM to the point where i could even take out the HDD that be great. LOL. I don't have any applications that need 2.5GB free just incase. Even if i run every single app on my system (not much since i don't install tons of junk) I still wouldn't use up 3GB total. If one app is behaving badly and using more memory than it really should be using, i don't want to have memory free for that purpose.

Now i will say that if you are using some apps like Photoshop and Lightwave or CAD stuff then yeah you need good amount of RAM available to those programs. Anyone knowing they are gonna use such software however would hopefully have prepared and got enough RAM for said programs PLUS the OS to run and do it's thing with SPARE left over.

[x-byte]

Generally speaking, experimenting with this could be more trouble than it's worth for the average user and is not advisable. If, on the other hand, you are reasonably competent and are trying to achieve a certain goal (like making it run on a P3 with 512MB of RAM), then this kind of tweaking is a reasonable thing to do.

Of course. I wasn't saying tweaking isn't a good thing. I just don't see the point doing this on systems with more than enough RAM. I will gladly see a benchmark showing the pay off for the tweaking other than some small insignificant numbers.

[bob_c_b]

I haven't tweaked anything and I clean boot with 45 services and plenty of free RAM. As someone else mentioned, unless you are trying to hammer Win 7 onto a system well below sys reqs, I don't see the point. Win 7 does such a better job with resource mgmt this kind of effort seems counter-intuitive.

[soldier1st]

the only tweak i did was to limit the startups but the rest is at default as i see no need to touch it as i want my memory to be used and why waste it?true my memory usage out of 2.5GB can be around 98% used at certain times, on xp disabling things like services may yield a performance gain but doubtful, if your running out of memory say for example then either reduce what your using or upgrade the memory as it's cheap.

[neudera]

Irrelevant. Windows 7 will eventually use all available RAM and readjust it according to what it needs to run efficiently.