Why Does Windows Vista Consume All My RAM?

This article contains a number of errors. When it speaks of Vista's memory usage it is mostly correct, not so with XP. Vista does manage memory better than XP but the changes are relatively minor. The real difference is in Task Managers display

Vista usually shows a very low number for "free" memory, while XP shows a much larger number for "available" memory. It is widely believed, even by some "experts", that the terms mean the same thing. WRONG. Available does not equate with free. Most of the "Available" memory is actually in use, some as a part of the file cache and some for other purposes. In a modern virtual memory system "Available" and "In-use" are not contradictory. The actual amount of memory that is actually free will be much smaller.

XP does not waste it's memory resources. It is simply that Vista has a number of innovative features to make greater use of it. One of these is "Super Fetch". But even with this feature disabled the free memory will fall to very low levels.

All modern versions of Windows follow the same principles. Memory should be used to the fullest possible extent - free memory is wasted memory. Vista is just somewhat better at doing this.

Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA

This is a response to Larry Miller.

Your answer is absolute rubbish. Vista has the worst memory management I' ve seen yet. It may be better for low end users email, media and a few applications (general use) but if you want ot do any serious work/development or run a serious system the memory management sucks! You can easily outperform Vista with less than half the memory on XP. Right now I'm running on a laptop with 2gig I have 2 command windows open, 1 Meta trader 4 terminal, 6 ultraedit windows and 4 IE the system has run out of free memory showing 0 and has totally stopped working. This has happend even though it is showing as having 1100 cached memory. According to Microsoft as soon as memeory is needed it will be freed up from the cached memory, this hasn't happened.

Vistas memory management is good in theory horrible in application, because the Microsofted it. if you have any microsoft app on your system that one is loaded constantly even if you never run it, while non MS apps have to be run hourly or more often to get into the superfetch. Also while superfetch may give you thoeretical application launch speed gains it in no way shape or form makes up for running your HD constantly to fill a modern systems average of 6 gig of ram.

well how are we,
i believe that ram frees up all its memory resources evenly across all programs at startup,there is no such thing as free ram because of this,now there is such a thing as ram leakage which occurs when a program lies idle without being used.Firefox is one big one to point out,as a browser it has a lot of memory leakage,to stop all this leakage we must shop around and not follow the sheep into the ditch.tech experts have given us the top 10 and safari or opera are two hell of good browsers to download,i have been studying this ram stuff for a long time now,and its important to have programs installed
that do no use up a lot of valuable resources on any and i mean any computer,glary utilities is a brilliant utility for everyone on the planet to have to keep your systemin top order and free of all that is bad in computing.

regards,
from johnny ucc in cork computers enviroment