Windows 7: tweaking memory usage

hello, just installed windows 7 7260 on my friend's laptop. but he only has 512MB of memory. Is there information on tweaking memory usage, I want to keep memory usage to minimum so that he won't have memory problems. I already suggested he should upgrade to 1GB, but for the time being I would like to know if there is way to tweak the memory usage, like stop services that are not needed or frequently used. thanks :)

Windows 7 is really good about automatically assigning memory for the amount of RAM you have installed on your system!
The less you have, the less it uses & the more you have the more it will "reserve".

So don't worry about it & let the OS take care of it. :)

I agree at the very least he should have 1Gb installed RAM although 2Gbs would be optimal for the OS.


But if you are bound & determined to tweak the services, follow this guide...it will take some time to do though!
You'll notice most of these services are already tweaked by default in W7U!

Windows 7 Service Configurations by Black Viper

you know you are right, I have the system with the 512 MB Ram running windows 7 for a few hours now, and after running updates and installing some applications, it has 114 MB of physical memory free, which isn't really bad, considering it was only 84MB free when it was running windows XP, but office is not yet installed, so I'll see how that will go.

so far the system is responsive, and internet browsing is smooth too.

superfetch will save memory by disabling it (not as much as in vista tho). Any other servers apart from dwm (aero) will have only tiny affect.

Beside just doing some tweaking you can just get a cheap 2gig USB drive at any local store and use it for Readyboost. It works great for my one laptop with 512 meg ram and since I can plug it in at anytime you can save your battery and take it out if you are not hitting the machine heavily.

hmm after installing more applications and updates, with anti-virus running in the background started to get less respunsive, but maybe I'm just comparing it to my faster system. while doing a virus scan you can't do anything else, the responce is really bad, I asume it's because it's running out of memory.

chrysalis how do you disable this superfetch?

I would be careful about disabling superfetch since it seems to be more tightly integrated with Win7 than previous versions.