does vista manage memory differently than XP?

Jul 10, 2007
12,041
3
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8 GB RAM in my vista ultimate box, not running much in terms of apps.
free physical memory showing up as 18 MB (fluctuates slightly between teens and 30MB).

2GB RAM on XP pro, also not running much but has 843372 Available Physical Mem (so about 800MB available).

is it a difference in terminology or the way the OS reports mem?
is XP swapping to disk more?
or does Vista just use a ton more memory?
 

masteryoda34

Golden Member
Dec 17, 2007
1,399
3
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I assume you're talking about the amount listed after "Free" under "Physical Memory" on the Performance tab of Task Manager. I just checked mine and it is really low as well. I never realized that before. I have 6GB of memory.

I always just look at the little bar graph thing labeled "Memory" under CPU usage.

Maybe someone else knows why the Free memory is so little.
 

Mem

Lifer
Apr 23, 2000
21,476
13
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Superfetch etc ...anyway this explains why link so no need to worry.


Many people tend to think of RAM as some sort of resource, and when it starts getting used up, they believe that they have a problem. In reality however, RAM is more like a cache. If your system is only using a small percentage of your cache is a huge waste. Imagine how your processor would work if its L2 cache never used more than 25% of its capacity. L2 cache is a small amount of high-speed memory that allows for high-speed access to the system's most commonly accessed data.

In previous versions of Windows, the Prefetcher wasn?t very aggressive in populating RAM. With Windows Vista however, SuperFetch tries its best to use as much RAM as it can, because if you have it you might as well make use of it.

As you may notice in the screenshot above, it only shows about 2.2GB of RAM used, yet doesn?t show the remainder as free. This is because the data in the cache is considered very low priority and any process that comes in and needs to use RAM will flush this data out transparently to the user or process. So, the memory is being used, but as far as the processes are concerned, it is empty. So what this boils down to is that even if you see that you have very little physical memory free, it is most likely nothing to worry about, it is just SuperFetch working.