Half the RAM used even at idle on Vista

[TikaC]

This question is pertaining to my brand new T61 (specs in sig). I've only had the machine a few days. I do have in my desktop sidebar: CPU/Memory Monitor, Italian word of the day, Contacts, and calculator. On the desktop I have the clock, weather, and a sticky note gadget. The screen is 1280 x 800 widescreen.

The system tray has what it came with plus a couple other items (though I uninstalled Norton system as it was required in order to install the Norton AntiVirus package with 1 yr. subscription I have for this machine). There are two battery monitors (I would like to keep only one), the Adobe Photo Downloader, Safely remove hardware, volume Control, hard drive shock indicator, Password manager, Windows Sidebar, Graphics Accellerator, Message Center, Access Connections, Disk Keeper, and another Access Connections (this time it has an informative popup on this one).

Now I am using Firefox at the moment and the memory used is at 55.8% according to the gadget. When idle it hovers in the upper 40s.

Is this normal? Does Vista really use up all that RAM? I was reading some of the items available for this machine on Lenovo and they mention 2GB RAM but I'm not sure if this machine takes only up to 2GB or if it can be upgraded to 4GB? Would that help the memory situation?

The machine doesn't lag at all, though. Runs smooth and quite well, even on battery power. I'm quite happy with the performance. I just want to preserve as much memory as possible.

Any tips would be appreciated in how to trim down to get more memory available.

[BillMorrow]

that T61 SHOULD be able to use 4gig..
3 gig for sure..
there are some limitations which i forgot..

for your reference..
my T60p running vista ultimate, not a lenovo preload, is using 716meg of memory (2gig total) with excel open and the usual stuff in the task bar..

welcome to the planetwide thinkpad community..
nicve website, BTW..

edit: without excel or anything else (except task manager) loaded, memory use was about 640meg..

with IE open it shoots up to about 730meg..

[Melvyn]

Firefox has documented lots of memory leaks, several of them are classified as features.

Under some circunstances, it's easy for ffox to rea 200mb or 300mb. Sometimes 500. People have reached 800mb.

If you search in google for "firefox memory leaks" you'll hundreds of way to fix that.

Also, it's possible that your wddm is taking over lot's of ram, and that ram ins not available there. Read about that too.

[Volker]

The T61 can use 4GB of ram, but without a 64 bit OS you are limited to about 3GB of it.

Firefox uses more ram for internal caches if your computer has enough. If you don't like it you can google for the preferences to turn that behavior off, but unused memory is also useless memory.

There are certainly *real* memory leaks, but definitely not to the tune of hundreds of megabytes.

[SHoTTa35]

forget preserving memory. There's no need, unused RAM is wasted RAM. What's the point of getting 2GB of RAM and have the OS squeeze itself into 128MB of it and leave the rest open? Older OSes used to load only essential stuff in the RAM and then put the rest in the pagefile, with Vista if you have enough RAM it will put everything in there instead of using the hardrive for temp storage.

Vista manages RAM differently and for good reason. If you load a game Vista will move non-important data from the RAM to the pagefile so your game (or other memory hogging application) has more RAM to use. That's the way it should have been done a while ago.

One more note, If you only have 512MB of RAM then Vista will only put so much in there and try to fit just a lil bit in the RAM and use the pagefile for other things. When you get 1GB it uses a lil more RAM, with 2GB it basically puts everything there which is what makes then system fly, no HD usage for stuff like opening IE or other programs in Windows, most are already in the cache thanks to SuperFetch.

[TikaC]

Bill - Thanks for the welcome and compliments on my site. I also have a blog about my ThinkPad/Vista experiences at http://cgi.bytebin.net/blog/ and am having a ball with this new computer. Thanks for the info on the memory usage. I didn't realize it would need that much. On my XP machine (which isn't listed in my sig - as it's a home-built system), I have 2GB and it rarely gets past 24% with Firefox going. I'd have to really open a lot of stuff to push it up to 50%.

Melvyn - They still have those memory leaks? Amazing. I hadn't realized that as it works quite well on my XP machine. I'll have to read more on that. I am not sure what a 'wddm' is. Could you tell me more about it?

Volker, SHoTTa35 - I do see your points about not wasting unused RAM. I'm so used to my XP machine doing things differently. Now I see why even at 50% used, the performance is quite good. Other systems I've used, the more memory it used, the slower the machine became as it needed to use the page file more.