Normal windows 7 RAM usage

High, I'm just wondering if 2.10gb or somewhere around that is normal ram usage for windows 7. My ram used to be @1.2gb or so and not much has changed since then except for a few upgrades in hardware being the graphics card and the PSU. I have attached a few screen shots of the task manager. Snip 1.1 is from processes and Snip 2 & 3 are from processes with all users selected. Earlier today when my system was sitting idle and had absolutely no other programs running, as I had shut them all down, it was running at 2.50gb. I dunno maybe I'm being overly obsessive about it. Let me know if you need any other info or screen shots.
-thanks so much

Chani said:

High, I'm just wondering if 2.10gb or somewhere around that is normal ram usage for windows 7. My ram used to be @1.2gb or so and not much has changed since then except for a few upgrades in hardware being the graphics card and the PSU. I have attached a few screen shots of the task manager. Snip 1.1 is from processes and Snip 2 & 3 are from processes with all users selected. Earlier today when my system was sitting idle and had absolutely no other programs running, as I had shut them all down, it was running at 2.50gb. I dunno maybe I'm being overly obsessive about it. Let me know if you need any other info or screen shots.
-thanks so much

Perfectly normal looking. Firefox and McA are using their normal high usage. WIn 7 takes approx half of the avail ram for fast cache and that is a good thing.

When you think about it you want it to use ram. If it doesnt use ram to do a task it will have to use the much slower pagefile on HD.

I maximize ram use by making the pagefile much smaller and forcing things to run in ram.

Welcome to Windows Seven Forums.

Zigzag offers good advice as there's no point in buying extra RAM if you are not going to use it.

That said, Windows 7 will just take what it needs - you have nothing to worry about.

Windows 7 will try to keep your idle (with no extra applications loaded) RAM usage around 40%, roughly. As you upgrade your RAM, as the amount it has to load is somewhat finite, this falls to 25-30%.

It does not fall as sharp as you would expect because as Windows 7 memory manager ''realizes'' it has more room, it will scale down page file usage, irrespectively of how much space you have reserved for it. I have 6054 MB reserved (equal to the amount of my available physical RAM) yet it uses 100-300 MB, probably to page out that small amount of memory that almost never gets called into use.

Superfetch (cached memory) really begins to shine when you have a lot of RAM. If you analyze it with some tools, you realize it's mostly made up of memory-backed files.

What are those memory backed files? Superfetch literally loads files from your disk into RAM - executables, dll's, Firefox, IE and Chrome cache files, and so on. As you equip your system with more RAM, the more it loads - and after it has had some idle time after boot to load'em, most applications you use often will start quickly because they don't need to be read from the disk, they are already in memory.

Of course, if you equip your machine with an SSD disk, the last two paragraphs I wrote become irrelevant.

Ok thanks everyone! I didn't know how windows 7 used ram or any older os for that matter... I just always get a little worried about viruses but you've all helped me not to worry about it! ~thank you all~

You're very welcome, Chani.

In terms of virus protection RAM is the least of your worries.

Keep your anti-virus software up to date, be very careful of what you download and never open e-mail attachments unless you trust their source.

Generally speaking, if something looks too good to be true, you can guarantee it is and should be treated with suspicion.

hey i have 4gb ram in my system and ANYTIME it uses 1.2 -1.4 gb ram!! why is it using this much ram?? is it normal? how?
my laptop is one month old only!!
pls clear my doubts!