Not sure what's so bad about 800mb, right after startup mines using about 998mb but ive got 4GB total so its probably just using whats availible to it.
Nothing, The lest amount of RAM available is what you want if your looking for performance...At least on machines with a manufacturing date > 2004.
Have you done any tweaking yet? I'm running x64 (7100) and with winamp running, my load is 833mb.
Phyiscal Memory:
Total: 4094
Cached: 1075
Avail: 3259
Free: 2251
Thats about the same as mine except I have 43mb free
XP uses about 400mb after startup (remember you cant see memory usage in XP's task manager, you need Process Explorer) Vista used about 1gb after startup and Win7 uses 800mb on startup.
I stopped using AV and also stopped tweaking the majority of system settings since Vista, Ive found both OS's are
a lot more flexible in their default configuration and that it adapts to my usage after about a week.
I believe the problem here is that Vista/Win7 made drastic changes compared with how XP handled memory and that's where people got confused about the changes.
Games Ive run on Vista systems using 1GB of ram have been able to dump everything minus about 200mb and that was while listening to music (it didnt skip a beat!), XP just cant do that under most circumstances.
How Vista/Win7 caches data into ram does really help because it doesn't need to constantly load files from Disk (stops disk trashing!) Loading files from Hard-Disk is probably the slowest medium you can still use today except for USB2 and Floppy disks which are even slower...
I gather that most of you guys seem to think that this cached data somehow ensures a performance hit, Well It doesn't
When you execute an application, It specifies what memory + addresses it needs, Windows either reports the addresses as free or finds the next available one (ASLR) then reports them all back for the application to load its data. Windows simply doesn't tell an application if that address contains cached data so the application simply overwrites it with its own data if their are no other free addresses.
Its very efficient, Cached data is simply ignored unless its needed and that gives applications a gigantuan performance boost loading data cached in RAM over loading data from hard-disk.
(XP = 2001, Win7 = 2008)
XP is more reactive to your usage than proactive, XP only loaded what was running at the time and you did need as much free memory as possible to run applications that required X amount of memory and that caused lots of disk trashing and slow application load times (You wouldn't notice the difference on newer machines but on 2002-2004 machines it was really noticeable) while Vista/Win7 loads the most commonly used data it can find based on your usage (I.E. If you dont use X service in services for a day then it doesn't get started on next startup)
I hope my explanation of some changes helps, its 4am here so I don't expect much
