(64b W7Pro) Satellite U500 using 3+ Gb RAM at idle???

[sjanzeir]

Hello 7ers,

Okay, for the past four days or so, I've been using my wife's Toshiba Satellite U500 to connect to the net through a USB-tethered Sony Ericsson Elm, with my B300 connected to it in ad hoc.

So, today was the first time I actually attended to the machine in four days, and it was slow as a snail to respond for about three minutes or so, then it came back to normal. So I checked the task manager, and found the machine using about 3.3Gb of RAM, even after I closed Firefox and what not. So where's all this RAM going? (Note that I had installed an additional 2Gb of RAM last week for a total of 4Gb.)

In other words, should I even worry about it? It was running fine on its original 2Gb of RAM until last week (albeit with the previous 32-bit version of 7 before I did a clean install of the 64-bit version), but it was using most of those 2Gb at idle just the same.

Thanks in advance.

 

[CLassicD]

When you say "slow" do you mean that your internet connectivity (firefox) is slow or windows 7 slow? This would not be an effect of updating your system.
As for your RAM this is normal, some will be being used for your OS and shared for your Graphics card, you could run Task Manager which will show you where your RAM is being used.

 

[marsmimar]

You could also use the Resource Monitor for a graphical overview of how RAM (and other resources) are being used.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/12523-resource-monitor.html

 

[sjanzeir]

What I meant to say was that the machine was slow to respond after having sat idle for the past four days, but that cleared up in about a minute or so, and it was behaving normally again. I then checked the task manager and the resource monitor, and although nothing seemed out of the ordinary (applications-wise), I was a little surprised to see so much RAM being used.

 

[CLassicD]

Ah ok, well for your machines speed you can check what applications and services are running in the background. This will impact on your machines performance. Again you can run Task Manager for this information.