Most Windows 7 PCs max out memory.

my system works well dont forget the ready boost we can use too:)

severedsolo said:

heres another article rebuffing these claims, ill post the relevant bit but include the link if your interested in reading the full article

Even on a system with only 1 GB of RAM, I found it difficult to exhaust all physical memory. At one point I had 13 browser tabs open, including one playing a long Flash video clip); at the same time I had opened a 1000-page PDF file in Acrobat Reader and a 30-page graphically intense document in Word 2010, plus Outlook 2010 downloading mail from my Exchange account, a few open Explorer windows, and a handful of background utilities running. And, of course, three memory monitoring tools. Even with that workload, I still had roughly 10% of physical RAM available.

full article: Windows 7 memory usage: What's the best way to measure? | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

well doh.

In that scenario he may have been using 90% of ram but I expect he was also using 1 gig of swap memory. What was he expecting?

You cant correctly judge memory usage in such a low ram machine.

On my laptop which came with 1 gig of ram, it only runs a few apps, typically 1 browser window using 1-2 tabs, irc chat and some explorer and notepad windows. It was swapping just with that usage. Now its upgraded to 3 gig of ram it runs great and usage is usually about 30-50% depending on uptime (since memory leaks exist in various apps). So if I upgraded to 2 gig the laptop probably would have been fine also. But 1 gig wasnt enough and thats very light usage.

On my desktop on bootup I am using already 700-800meg ram. Would be foolish to think I could then load a dozen IE tabs, acrobat, word and outlook only using an extra 100meg of ram, that is insane. IE for a start is quite memory hungry, I have adove flash, adobe pdf, sun java addons, no toolbars. With them each tab uses around 40 meg of memory to load google's home page. It goes much higher when a proper website is loaded. Outlook uses about 150meg of ram, I got 2 copies of word running using 100meg each for 2 page documents.

The reason he is seeing lower ram usage is.

(a) windows will manage low ram situations by swapping to disk, so data is moved from real ram to a swapfile. Bingo less ram used.
(b) windows will cache less data, so sure less ram is used but also things run slower.

at the moment I am using 3.48 gig of ram 58% of my 6 gig of ram.

severedsolo said:

ah but if you actually read the article, he goes on to say that it memory manages better on ALL machines,

To help cut through the confusion, I’ve taken a careful look at memory usage on a handful of Windows 7 systems here, with installed RAM ranging from 1 GB to 10 GB.

i just included the 1GB bit to show that even on a machine with 1GB of RAM it works (and does anyone actually buy a new pc with only 1GB of ram? do they even sell them anymore? excluding netbooks ofc)

Works? Barely Works well? Never.

More FUD...

Editor's note: The person quoted in this story as "Craig Barth" is actually Randall C. Kennedy, an InfoWorld contributor. Kennedy, who presented himself as the CTO of Devil Mountain Software, no longer works at InfoWorld. Given that he disguised his identity to Computerworld and a number of other publications, the credibility of Kennedy's statements is called into question. Rather than simply remove stories in which he is quoted, we have left them online so readers can weigh his data and conclusions for themselves.