MBP13 on Win7, what's eating up my RAM?

I have Firefox, VLC and Digsby running, my RAM is 90% used. What's going on?

My other PCs don't have this problem and it's causing major slow downs on my computer!

 

Have you taken a look to see what processes are running? You should be able to use the processes tab in Task Manager and then sort by memory to find the offending bit of software.

 

yeah, adds up to less than 300MB, but my physical memory usage is very high.

 

Make sure to hit show processes from All Users so you can see the system processes as well. Its most likely one of them where you haven't launched many apps.

 

As I recall, I think W7 caches and preloads/keeps things in RAM similar to OS X, so that you have them accessible as quickly as possible, but they're inactive?

 

This is happening in boot camp?

 

Go into Task Manager and performance tab.

It should have a readout on RAM on the left:
Physical Memory:
Total = total physical ram (mine is 4GB so 4095MB)
Cached = stuff it guesses you will need (Win7 usually uses 2GB or so of a 4GB system)
Available = Cached + Free = 2300MB or so
Free = completely unused RAM = 300MB or so on mine

The only really important one is "available".

I am using about 1.7GB when I have umpteen things open.

If your "available" amount is amazingly small, something else is going on besides what you have listed.

 

Total: 1766
Cached: 992
Available: 970ish (yes, it is lower than cached)
Free: 40ish

Yes, I was showing all processes from all users. I only have firefox and a few background apps running that I know do not eat RAM.

And yeah, in bootcamp (latest version) to run Win7 Pro x64.

 

As KernalPanic said above, available is what you want to be looking at, free is merely a Windows 7 addition to show what is not being allocated at all at present. 970 is how much available ram you still have for windows to use at the present time.

 

Right now I'm "only" using about 50% of my RAM, but I shouldn't even be using THAT much.

I have Digsby, Firefox, Onenote open. The total amount of memory used is in processes is far less than what should be taken up.

 

Windows 7 will use about 50% regardless of how much ram you have. E.g. if you have 8Gb, it'll likely use about 4GB while if you have 1GB, it'll use around 500-600MB.

 

Is this on the MacBooks in particular or on all Windows 7 installations 'supposedly'? Because my Home Premium x64 typically idles at about 30-40% RAM usage with 2GB of RAM.

 

It should be around 50%~ and fluctuate quite a bit when the cache builds up for all windows 7 systems.

 

Hey I am thinking about to buy a MBP (never used OSX) and using bootcamp to install win7 and I am going to be purchasing the 13in affordable model (lol) 2gb version and was wondering if I will be able to run CSS on it? with the available ram left?

 

My M17x uses about 30% RAM with Firefox, Digsby, uTorrent, Virtual CloneDrive and Dropbox running... :/

 

The only time my Windows 7 installation ever hits 50% is running RAM consuming programs, like if I have multiple Firefox tabs open.

As I speak it's using 41% with 5 Firefox tabs open.

I never experience it idling at 50% with no programs open, or even at 50% with several lighter programs open such as now.

Now, in Windows Vista...THAT used up 50%.

It should definetely be able to run CSS, although I can't say for sure. I run the likes of Crysis on 2GB of RAM without a problem, with Windows 7 64-bit.

 

For anyone whose computer is using less than 50% RAM, have you done any tweaking to your Windows 7 setup?

Me - no tweaking
Total RAM: 4GB
Cached: 1GB
Available: 2.3GB
Free: 1.43GB


Also, Windows 7 will drop the size of cache in RAM if it is needed. RAM is very fast so this effect of the cache 'using so much space' should not be noticable to programs that want a lot of RAM/not in cache.

 

Now you mention it, I've done extensive tweaking, however nothing that accounts to over a 15% drop in RAM from the 'average' 50%.

First time I loaded Windows 7 on, it was using 35%-40%, now it uses about 5% less than that through my tweaking.

 

Only SSD tweaks for my M17x.

 

BTW, Supercache is the cache feature, so if you have disabled that you will be using less RAM than the others.

A waste of RAM for most users if Supercache is not enabled.

 

My MBP13 is sitting at 34% with browser and Digsby running.

The key to ANY Windows install is managing startup programs and turn off things like Windows Search if you don't use it, and if you have more than 2GB RAM, turning off the pagefile can actually make memory management more efficient and boost performance. I wouldn't do it with less than 2GB though, and I would tread carefully until you're at 4GB or more.