Can someone tell me why my computer is using so much RAM and if it's normal or not? It's always somewhere between 35%- 40%. I currently have four sticks of 2GB ram, so 8GB in total. Here are some pics from my resource monitor.
You have Windows running, gadgets all over your desktop, Firefox is running, MS Security Essentials, iTunes, Truecrypt, Malwarebytes, bittorrent, and lord knows what else because you have some items hidden in the notification area in the lower right. Turn off whatever you dont need on all the time and get some memory back...
Or...Just don't bloody worry about it. You have 8 frickin gigabytes!!!!! ...Sorry...but I'm just fend up with people who have all this RAM, compared to me, complaining about RAM usage. IT IS IRRITATING! There is nothing you need to change or alter. It is perfectly fine as is. You spent all that money on having that large amount of RAM, you should bloody well use it. Otherwise why did you waste all of your money?
/rant ...
Look at Task Manager, Performance tab. Look at the Physical memory block at the bottom. On my box with 8GB of RAM, I've only got 4GB free....but my Available RAM is 6.5GB. So the rest is used as cache and Windows has preloaded and populated it with information that I am likely going to use..but if an application comes along and needs to use it, it will free it immediately.
Personally, I'd rather see all 8GB of RAM in use at all time. Getting data to and from RAM is faster than any hard drive out there.
Frankly, under that sort of load, using 3.5GB of RAM is pretty good. You probably have a large cache, but that is also good - you're using the RAM (efficiently, I might add) that you paid for. I wouldn't worry about it unless you're having issues, which aren't likely to be memory-usage related anyway.
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