New
#1
Why is Win7 a Memory HOG?
Let me first say that I've always been a believer in the theory that Microsoft's evolution in software is as much about driving new hardware sales as it is about making any tangible beneficial improvements to the average user of their products.
I'm running a laptop with a 128GB SSD and 4GB of RAM and can remember the day clearly when I was running an Apple IIe with 128MB of RAM. I realize that was a long time ago. And I'm not saying the ever increasing requirements for today's software are not totally unjustified.
But I recently installed a memory monitor in my system tray on my Win7 Pro 64-bit machine on my brand new Lenovo Thinkpad Edge, which doesn't comes with that much bloatware and have been watching it. I run the old version 3 of Nod32 Anti-Virus/Malware which has about the smallest footprint of anything out there. I typically have an old version 2 of Photoshop ELEMENTS with maybe one 5MP photo loaded (not the full version of PS), Firefox, Word, Excel and Thunderbird open at the same time. I also run Open Pandora for music which admittedly is poorly written and is a memory hog. But my machine is typically using 2.5-3 GB of memory!!
Are you kidding me? 3 GB of RAM in use and I'm not encoding video or editing CAD drawings? And when you open task manager and look at the processes, things don't seem to add up to that total (I may just be too lazy to add every single process.)
Firefox is #1 using 400MB
OpenPandora 106MB
Thunderbird 85MB
Photoshop 65MB
Explorer 44MB
dwm.exe 33MB
Excel 24MB
WINWORD 18MB
plugin-container for firefox 16MB
I'm a bit disappointed with Firefox memory usage (I was using Chrome but still there are too many sites with functionality not compatible with Chrome). And I've come to just assume all the Microsoft Apps are always going to be gluttons for RAM usage. Light and compact is just not a mantra that exists over in Redmond.
But is this typical for most Win7 users out there? 2GB of RAM is still shipped standard with a lot of current model PCs and Laptops. What the hell is going on with Win7 memory usage or mem usage on PCs in general? It seems almost out of control?