Why so much free RAM?

[bobdobolina]

I have 1024MB of RAM and almost always have 600 or so MB free. The only time I see more usage is with Photoshop or Nuendo (recording). Is there any way to cache more stuff in RAM so my system feels faster?

 

[CrackRabbit]

you could turn off virtual memory, it would force your system to use more ram. But I feel its generaly a bad idea unless you have TONS of memory (1.5gb+).

 

[Psych]

Turning off virtual memory isn't handled gracefully in Windows because its not designed too well in this respect. Certain apps will try to write to VM, and issues shall occur. The OS always uses a little VM for redundancy and safety of data in RAM.

I think 1Gb is enough to try turning off the VM, but you could try 2 things first. Set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive to 1 to cause the OS to load the kernel into memory. Theoretically, this should make the computer run faster.

You can also try going to System -> Advanced - > Performance -> Advanced and tinker around in there for some simple tweaking.

 

[Nothinman]

Turning off virtual memory is impossible in a protected mode system, to turn off virtual memory you would have to run in real mode which means all you can run is DOS.

I have 1024MB of RAM and almost always have 600 or so MB free. The only time I see more usage is with Photoshop or Nuendo (recording). Is there any way to cache more stuff in RAM so my system feels faster?

If you look at the "System Cache" number on taskmanager's Performance tab that will tell you how much memory is being used by the filesystem cache. Chances are it's the amount of free memory you're seeing and there's nothing more you can do.

you could turn off virtual memory, it would force your system to use more ram. But I feel its generaly a bad idea unless you have TONS of memory (1.5gb+).

It's a bad idea no matter how much memory you have.

Set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive to 1 to cause the OS to load the kernel into memory. Theoretically, this should make the computer run faster.

This does nothing other than waste a few K of memory, if the code was actually being used it wouldn't have been paged to disk. And on top of that since the kernel/executive is paged in from binaries on disk (executables, drivers, etc) when they need to be freed for something else they're just paged back to the original files on disk and not the pagefile.

If your system genuinely feels slow with 1G memory, I highly doubt your problem is with the pagefile or memory manager configuration.