win 7 uses 1 gig of memory?

it is like driving a car, you will start panicking when you notice (more like perception) the car is using more fuel when it gets below 1/2 or 1/4 tank. Often we forget our cars come with a reserve tank, giving us a grace period before our vehicle chokes on air and die on us.

People regard RAM usage like fuel in a car's tank.

not quite sure if you understood what i was saying earlier
i (deliberately)let crysis run out of memory with disabled pagefile and windows rather let it run out of memory than freeing up memory for it to use (3GB of memory in total 1GB occupied by windows)
win7 memory usage didn't change throughout the process (by now well over 1GB without anything out of the ordinary running in the background)
i don't mind utilization of resources that are idle and available either but i do mind applications occupying more resources than they have to
i only have so much memory
while it's enough to let windows run without page file i don't know if it will always stay that way with 1/4th of it preoocupied by the OS
perhaps i'll have a look at the process explorer to see where my memory is being hogged
thanks scott

the relation to my current problem is that a memory usage that is too high would force me to reenable the page file

OK - But understand that the pagefile has is no effect on memory usage. And very little on general performance. It's merely there to facilitate swapping should that be needed. So IMHO, you are distracting yourself by playing with it.


Now, help me to understand the source: Are you experiencing actual issues centered around memory usage? Or have you simply decided you don't like the number you are seeing?

Because as explained already, (with a link to more detailed info provided), Win 7 uses memory as cache for faster launcing of applications. And memory used in that manner is surrendered to active apps just as if it were empty. Understand that XP also caches. Just that 7's implementation is a couple generations more sophisticated: Apps used and then shut down in XP stay in memory and launch faster the second time around. In 7, the start up routines get pre-loaded and the OS is sophisticated enough to know that you use (Office, SAP, and Outlook) during work hours. And then game on the weekends. And will alter which programs it caches according to your general schedule. Now, given that a certain amount of memory really is needed to run the OS, using some additional amount for caching purposes does result in a higher 'usage' number. But this is normal and intended behavior, and there to keep your machine as responsive as practicable. If it's jsut a number on the screen that's bothering you then IMHO, you're not going to get very far in trying to "Fix" it, because it's not broken.

yes i did experience issues

after a while of running win 7 it started using more and more memory (namely one of the svc hosts) so some games did actually start to run out of memory

call me a liar but i also have issues while using a swap file
for some reason win 7 would write to the swap file even tho the memory wasn't full yet and it was naturally very noticeable

and, sorry but i'm kinda getting tired of explaining it so i'm just going to quote my earlier post

Kehool said:

i (deliberately)let crysis run out of memory with disabled pagefile and windows rather let it run out of memory than freeing up memory for it to use (3GB of memory in total 1GB occupied by windows)
win7 memory usage didn't change throughout the process (by now well over 1GB without anything out of the ordinary running in the background)

that's how i experienced the win7 prefetch feature

svchost is a generic process and could be any number of things. Please download the Process Explorer linked above to see what is the real source. Until you do this, it will be impossible to locate the actual source of the trouble.


Now - This sounds like 32 bit behaviour: You also understand that application space in 32 bit windows is 2GB, correct? And that when you're running a (32 bit app) in 32 bit Windows, that application is therefore limited to only 2GB maximum and will use the swap file, right?

You reallllllyyyy should'ntttt have disabled the page file..... Never ever......... Although you have 4 GB RAM... if 8 GB then you should maybe REDUCE (NOT DISABLE) the page file.... to maybe 3 GB????