# High memory usage, how to lower it?



## Urbklr (Feb 22, 2009)

So my fulltime rig at the moment is my Aspire One. I know its not much, but it does the job, and lasts 5 hours on a charge. I recently decided to dual-boot XP with Vista. After weeks of trying to lower memory usage by disabling services or vliting and install, I tried Windows 7. Windows 7 always had low mem usage on my desktop and I heard good things so I figured it would give me XP-like RAM usage. No, this didn't work. Both Vista and 7 take 60% of my RAM idling. 80%+ while browsing the net, this is with services disabled(Superfetch, Windows Search). XP uses only 400MB of RAM with lots of stuff open. What is up here? How can I lower the memory usage?

The Aspire One is the 1GB of Ram model.


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## craigwhiteside (Feb 22, 2009)

I cant really remember what services i disabled for Windows 7 on my desktop (im on the laptop now)

but i got it to idle between 22-26% on 2GB of RAM (I'll post what services i disabled tommorow for ya)


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## tong (Feb 22, 2009)

it's a misconception that vista or windows 7 utilize a lot of ram. I used to say the same thing until i wen hunting to turn that service off.  Vista and W7 actually use ram like cache. it will preemptively load stuff into ram to make it's access and load times faster on the programs that u are most likely to use.  If you turn it off it will seem like your system is actually running slower.


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## Urbklr (Feb 22, 2009)

tong said:


> it's a misconception that vista or windows 7 utilize a lot of ram. I used to say the same thing until i wen hunting to turn that service off.  Vista and W7 actually use ram like cache. it will preemptively load stuff into ram to make it's access and load times faster on the programs that u are most likely to use.  If you turn it off it will seem like your system is actually running slower.



Yep, its called Superfetch. I disable it on all my computers, keeps the RAM usage low. I don't notice a difference between the two other than, when disabled, it lowers RAM usage.


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## kid41212003 (Feb 22, 2009)

tong said:


> it's a misconception that vista or windows 7 utilize a lot of ram. I used to say the same thing until i wen hunting to turn that service off.  Vista and W7 actually use ram like cache. it will preemptively load stuff into ram to make it's access and load times faster on the programs that u are most likely to use.  If you turn it off it will seem like your system is actually running slower.


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## craigwhiteside (Feb 23, 2009)

Here ya go, this is what i used (since Windows 7's services are practically the same as Vista's)

http://www.tweakhound.com/vista/tweakguide/page_8.htm


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