You are looking in the wrong places. Look into task manager > performance tab and see how much physical memory is free - probably very little. It's all used for caching. If you pump up your RAM with programs, you will see a considerable performance degradation. You could easily try that out by installing a virtual partition (e.g. with vBox) to which you allocate half of your RAM.
Use Process Monitor for more info too.
You can check which process is using more memory from task manager and then you can solve your problem.
Teerex - curious about your comment since I did turn superfetch off (actually set to boot only aka reg "2") because it was thrashing my drive. I'm at a nice 25% allocation of physical ram, which is what I would expect with 4 gb. That is, expect from XP, but I'm a noob with 7. Thoughts about the value of superfetch relative to constant thrashing?
Superfetch is a good thing. Without it, your overall experience will be somewhat slower because the RAM will be less efficiently utilised. Therefore, disabling superfetch is a bad thing.
"Constant thrashing" sounds abnormal. If you use a 3rd-party disk defragger, it's possible that the "thrashing" is caused by the defragger's mangling of the on-disk layout (it's not prefetch-aware, so it lays out the file fragments in a way which may look pretty, but is in fact slower). That's a guess of course, and you might want to investigate the thrashing rather than disable superfetch.
Ahh, yes, I've been using Defraggler. So is the recommended course to enable Superfetch and use 7's built in defrag tool? I assume this tool is Superfetch aware? I do know that once Superfetch was disabled, my thrashing stopped. But maybe I put myself in this situation by using Defraggler which made Superfetch work all the more harder to fix things Defraggler might have messed up.
It's definitely recommended to leave Superfetch enabled. There wouldn't be any "official" MS recommendations regarding 3rd-party defragmenters, but it's a bad idea to use one which interferes with prefetch optimisation. Some background info is in this post:
Windows 7 defrag vs Diskeeper
The built-in defragger? It's prefetch aware, and that in turn helps Superfetch for reasons that will become more obvious based on the info in the linked post.
Short version: the in-built defragger organises files according to prefetch heuristics, and that layout may look very, very strange to a non-prefetch-aware 3rd-party defragger which has its own definition of "good layout". The 3rd-party defragger may destroy the prefetch-optimised layout, thus making it more painful and slow for superfetch to page that content into RAM.
The "thrashing" certainly sounds excessive. My guess that it might be linked to the use of a 3rd-party defragger is just that - a guess. If you let the in-built defragger do its thing instead of "defraggler", and that still doesn't help mitigate the disk activity, you may wish to consider starting your own thread on the topic of "excessive disk utilisation when Superfetch is enabled", or something along those lines.
First post here. I can not figure out how to start a new thread, so I am piggy backing on here. Would someone, please, point me in the right direction.
My situation is that I run windows 7 64bit on a 32GB RAM, 3.0 GHz Xeon quad-core machine with RAID 0, striped, 10,000 RPM drives. I thought 64bit OSs were capable of using "lots" of RAM. I have tried to push things by running two dozen you tube videos, a WMP video and AVG full scan at max speed all running at once and the max RAM usage I get is 12% compared to RAM usage of 8% - 10% (depending on how long my machine has been on) with no apps open. What gives????????????
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