Thanks in advance for reading:
I have a Dell Optiplex 3010 with 8gbs of RAM on an i5 3470.
It was running on 6GB but I just added another 4gb (4 per bank).
My RAM usage is still stuck at 65%-the same as before the upgrade.
I can't seem to figure out what is utilizing so much RAM.
Any help here would be greatly appreciated.
That sounds fairly normal. My only machines with 8GB or more are running Win10, but the memory management works much the same. Up to about 8GB installed RAM about 50%-60% is in use, windows seems to take advantage of the extra RAM to reduce the amount that has to be kept in the swapfile. Only at 16GB or more does the memory in use level out (and hence the percentage drop).
On my 7 machine I am usually at 2.25 gb or less out of 8 and I'm currently at 30%. That's with 2 browsers running. I usually only get that high when running a virtual machine. What apps are you running? Have you gone through services and msconfig?
Right click the task bar and select Start task manager, under view | Select columns make sure Working set memory is selected. Now click the memory working set to organize from highest to lowest. Now you'll know what's consuming RAM.
Why is that a problem?
The more RAM you have, the more space Windows has for keeping useful things in it. You now have more thing in cache instead of reloading them from the pagefile or from files or other places. That's where the speed improvement comes from.
Unless you have a problem of RAM not being enough, I would say that's fine, and can go even better. Remember that ideal RAM usage is 100%.
Your system max ram is 8GB.
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