# Does Vista always use 50% ram?



## alexp999 (Sep 12, 2007)

I recently upgraded from 1gb to 2 gb of ram. I am running vista x64. When I was running 1gb of ram, vista would idle at 50% ram, which i though was fair enough. Now I have upgraded to 2gb of ram, it is still idling at 50% ram, but nothing software based has changed. Where has this extra half a gig of memory usage come from? Does it reduce itself when I play a game? One reason I bought 2gb of memory is becasue I though it would give my games 1.5gb of memory as opposed to only 0.5 gb of memory, when I was running 1gb total sys memory. Anyone know what is going on? My dad has 4gb of mem, I will have to check tonight to see if vista has magically found 2gb worth of memory usage to idle with.
Hope someone can help, Any thoughts/ideas greatly appreciated.

Thanks.


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## LiveOrDie (Sep 12, 2007)

it did the same with me man when i had 2gb, vista x64 will use 50% of your ram till you start using over 4gb because x64 uses double what x86 does and one big memory drain is that x64 uses a program to run all the 32bit programs and vista will alway use a high percentage of your ram till you get over the 4gb mark, put it like this more ram you have faster vista will run because it has more head space for loading and running programs it also uses more ram because the cpu is getting it full use if you have vista x86 start using that x64 isnt much faster with games and 32bit programs vista x64 is faster installing and copying but that about it man it has to much crap that you dont need atm


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## Random Murderer (Sep 12, 2007)

Live OR Die said:


> it did the same with me man when i had 2gb vista x64 will use 50% of your ram till you start using over 4gb because x64 uses double what x86 does and one big memory drain is that x64 uses a program to run all the 32bit programs and vista will alway use a percentage of your ram till you get over the 4gb mark put it like this more ram you have fast vista will run because it has more head space for loading and running programs it also uses more ram because the cpu is getting it full use if you have vista x86 start using that x64 isnt much faster with games and 32bit programs vista x64 is faster installing and copying but that about it man it has to much crap that you dont need atm



woah *blinks*
punctuation?
i couldn't understand that for the life of me!


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## Solaris17 (Sep 12, 2007)

its called superfetch i had this problem too when i upgraded. open a run box windows+R and type msconfig. go to the services tab find superfetch and disable it...clear your temp and prefetch folders reboot and you should see a diff. see what superfetch is is it basically thinks its a really good idea to cache everything in your ram so it loads faster unfortunately it never took to mind ppl that game..anyway doing this really sorted me out you should see a little drop at the least...also go to the vista tweaks thread it will tell you all kinds of services you can shutdown to save resources.


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## LiveOrDie (Sep 12, 2007)

Random Murderer said:


> woah *blinks*
> punctuation?
> i couldn't understand that for the life of me!


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## alexp999 (Sep 12, 2007)

Solaris17 said:


> its called superfetch i had this problem too when i upgraded. open a run box windows+R and type msconfig. go to the services tab find superfetch and disable it...clear your temp and prefetch folders reboot and you should see a diff. see what superfetch is is it basically thinks its a really good idea to cache everything in your ram so it loads faster unfortunately it never took to mind ppl that game..anyway doing this really sorted me out you should see a little drop at the least...also go to the vista tweaks thread it will tell you all kinds of services you can shutdown to save resources.



K thanks, will try that, where are the prefetch folders though?

Thanks.


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## Sasqui (Sep 12, 2007)

Solaris17 said:


> its called superfetch i had this problem too when i upgraded.



Solaris - do you know if windows swaps this out to HDD when application(s) demands more memory than available - to prevent the swapping of the application?


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## HellasVagabond (Sep 12, 2007)

29% here....


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## Solaris17 (Sep 12, 2007)

alexp999 said:


> K thanks, will try that, where are the prefetch folders though?
> 
> Thanks.




C:\Windows...the prefetch and temp folders are right their.



Sasqui said:


> Solaris - do you know if windows swaps this out to HDD when application(s) demands more memory than available - to prevent the swapping of the application?



Most of the time if a program damands the ram it will dump what it has cached but it wont dump it all it will start to use the pagefile but im honestly not sure if it starts to page the cache or if it starts to page the app that needs it id go with it paging the app though. because vista isnt that smart but it will start to dump cache if a app needs the space cause it takes priority...i even think theirs a tweak someware for it.


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## alexp999 (Sep 12, 2007)

blank (deleted after PC posted twice ?)


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## alexp999 (Sep 12, 2007)

Solaris17 said:


> C:\Windows...the prefetch and temp folders are right their.
> 
> 
> 
> Most of the time if a program damands the ram it will dump what it has cached but it wont dump it all it will start to use the pagefile but im honestly not sure if it starts to page the cache or if it starts to page the app that needs it id go with it paging the app though. because vista isnt that smart but it will start to dump cache if a app needs the space cause it takes priority...i even think theirs a tweak someware for it.



Thankyou, It has worked, after applying most of the tweaks in the thread (except those for MCE and Streaming to xbox cus i use those), and disabling and emptying superfetch, i know have an idle memory usage of 37% and my pagefile has halved in size. IMO i think vista boots in and shutsdown faster without pre-fetch. will have to see how the games run now. Will let you know if I get any improvement, oh and I'm pretty sure my Vista rating for the memory has gone up 0.1 too!!!

Thanks again for your help, stupid vista loading all these unnessecary services.


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## ghost101 (Sep 12, 2007)

Superfetch does release the memory when its demanded. I know this because whenever i run a vmware with say 500 megs of RAM, my memory usage at first plummets from 700 to 300 and then rises again as the virtual machine boots up.


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## alexp999 (Sep 12, 2007)

ghost101 said:


> Superfetch does release the memory when its demanded. I know this because whenever i run a vmware with say 500 megs of RAM, my memory usage at first plummets from 700 to 300 and then rises again as the virtual machine boots up.



Thanks for your post, glad superfetch works properly for you, but i have just run HL2 and now a particular but where the framerate dropped to about 40-50 FPS now stays at 65+. I have only noticed improvements in turning it off, IE loads faster, think it depends what you use your PC for and how fast your harddrive is. For me it is better off. Oh and by the way after a little more idling, memory usage has now been as low as 35%! and a third of the Pagefile. So much better now.

Thanks.


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## Solaris17 (Sep 12, 2007)

your welcome glad it worked


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## effmaster (Sep 12, 2007)

Solaris17 said:


> its called superfetch i had this problem too when i upgraded. open a run box windows+R and type msconfig. go to the services tab find superfetch and disable it...clear your temp and prefetch folders reboot and you should see a diff. see what superfetch is is it basically thinks its a really good idea to cache everything in your ram so it loads faster unfortunately it never took to mind ppl that game..anyway doing this really sorted me out you should see a little drop at the least...also go to the vista tweaks thread it will tell you all kinds of services you can shutdown to save resources.



Il have to try this out myself and see but the thing is i won't know too much other than ram usage going down because:

does anyone know how to get my frames per second to show up on the game screen for CoD2 cause i cant figure it out for the life of me

Any help would be appreciated

EDIT: I found the 2 folders but im worried about deleting certain stuff it might bite me back in the but when it takes a while to load a program or an error messgae comes up. lol help me out here wouldya


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## Solaris17 (Sep 12, 2007)

did you try the tild(~) key or w/e one brings up the consol? usually their are built in commands like this

fps
showfps=1
fps=1


try those..


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## effmaster (Sep 12, 2007)

Solaris17 said:


> did you try the tild(~) key or w/e one brings up the consol? usually their are built in commands like this
> 
> fps
> showfps=1
> ...



lol i will tonight lol thanks and btw i never did like that button in CoD2 since it sits right next to my 1 ans 2 buttons which are what i use to switch weapons and to voicechat lol i always seem to hit that~ button at least 3 thimes every multiplayer match lol


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## alexp999 (Sep 12, 2007)

Done a couple more bits by getting rid of stuff i didn't need at startup and now i have got it down to 32%, with MCE extensions and media sharing running, defender running, speedfan running, ATI CCC running, and AVG antivirus running. Don't think I'm gonna get much better than that.

Thanks for your help, computer runs much better now, games run better, even with superfetch turned off, i feel even smaller applications run faster and windows defo boots in faster.

Thanks again.


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## Solaris17 (Sep 12, 2007)

no problem man and when im not so busy in a couple hours or something ..maybe tomarrow look at this thread ill have a couple more cheats for ya..its good stuff and ur rig will run bwetter.


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## LiveOrDie (Sep 12, 2007)

here try this Program


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## alexp999 (Sep 13, 2007)

effmaster said:


> Il have to try this out myself and see but the thing is i won't know too much other than ram usage going down because:
> 
> does anyone know how to get my frames per second to show up on the game screen for CoD2 cause i cant figure it out for the life of me
> 
> Any help would be appreciated



Here you go, I looked it up:

Command to Show FPS
Shows your Frames Per Second in the game. Useful for benchmarks and likewise.

At the main menu screen of the demo enter the "Game Options" and Enable the Console. From there, push your tilde (~) button to bring down the console and type the following:

/cg_drawFPS 1  Simple FPS Display  
/cg_drawFPS 2  Verbose FPS Display  
/cg_drawFPS 3  Time FPS Display  
/cg_drawFPS 0  Display Off  

Hope it helps.


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## effmaster (Sep 13, 2007)

alexp999 said:


> Here you go, I looked it up:
> 
> Command to Show FPS
> Shows your Frames Per Second in the game. Useful for benchmarks and likewise.
> ...




Just so you know i own the full version of CoD2 and not some demo of it

But thanks all the same wont have time tonight but maybe tomorrow or this weekend when i have more time


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## Mussels (Sep 13, 2007)

alexp999 said:


> I recently upgraded from 1gb to 2 gb of ram. I am running vista x64. When I was running 1gb of ram, vista would idle at 50% ram, which i though was fair enough. Now I have upgraded to 2gb of ram, it is still idling at 50% ram, but nothing software based has changed. Where has this extra half a gig of memory usage come from? Does it reduce itself when I play a game? One reason I bought 2gb of memory is becasue I though it would give my games 1.5gb of memory as opposed to only 0.5 gb of memory, when I was running 1gb total sys memory. Anyone know what is going on? My dad has 4gb of mem, I will have to check tonight to see if vista has magically found 2gb worth of memory usage to idle with.
> Hope someone can help, Any thoughts/ideas greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks.



its superfetch, amongst other things. vista increases the amount of memory used for things like that, when more is available. it drops the ram usage when its needed. for gaming and so on. with 4GB of ram i use 33%, but the performance tab says i have 22MB free - superfetch is using all my ram secretly. It makes people scream in fear, but its great cause the OS runs better using all the ram, instead of paging to the HD all the time. and its not like it takes long for memory to dump from ram and new stuff to load in.



Live OR Die said:


> it did the same with me man when i had 2gb, vista x64 will use 50% of your ram till you start using over 4gb because x64 uses double what x86 does and one big memory drain is that x64 uses a program to run all the 32bit programs and vista will alway use a high percentage of your ram till you get over the 4gb mark, put it like this more ram you have faster vista will run because it has more head space for loading and running programs it also uses more ram because the cpu is getting it full use if you have vista x86 start using that x64 isnt much faster with games and 32bit programs vista x64 is faster installing and copying but that about it man it has to much crap that you dont need atm



woah. what crap. x64 doesnt use one MB more than x86, and it does NOT load a program to emulate 32 bit. all modern 64 bit CPU's can handle 32 bit as well, so they're ran natively.
it also has no 'crap that you dont need' its got the same programs/services as x86 does.

Please man, go do some reseearch before bagging out something you've never tried.



Sasqui said:


> Solaris - do you know if windows swaps this out to HDD when application(s) demands more memory than available - to prevent the swapping of the application?



Superfetch loads commonly ran apps into memory - this DOES include games. so if you start up say, BF2142 - the exe and dll files are already in ram, and it knows what to load next from past launches. Once it does load this, it ditches all other files in superfetch memory that arent related to the program you launched, so there is no slowdown at all.


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## Namslas90 (Sep 13, 2007)

You can increase performance by enabeling "Ready Boost".  Add a 1Gb flash/jump drive to a rear USB port.  Then open Computer > right-click on the flash/jump drive (that you want to use).  Choose Properties > ReadyBoost tab > Use this device. (optionally choose how much of the device to use).

Doing this will use the flash/jump drive as an extension of the Memmory and Page File (in Vista they work in tandem) and therefore increase speed of the data access as it won't be paging as much to the HDD.


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## Mussels (Sep 13, 2007)

Namslas90 said:


> You can increase performance by enabeling "Ready Boost".  Add a 1Gb flash/jump drive to a rear USB port.  Then open Computer > right-click on the flash/jump drive (that you want to use).  Choose Properties > ReadyBoost tab > Use this device. (optionally choose how much of the device to use).
> 
> Doing this will use the flash/jump drive as an extension of the Memmory and Page File (in Vista they work in tandem) and therefore increase speed of the data access as it won't be paging as much to the HDD.



with personal expereince on 1 2 and 4GB of ram, readyboost only helps if you have 1GB or less of ram. it really does help if you have 512MB or so, but for 2GB and above it doesnt do much.


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## LonGun (Sep 13, 2007)

so I can safely go into the Services and Stop and Disable that SuperFetch running?


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## Namslas90 (Sep 13, 2007)

Mussels said:


> with personal expereince on 1 2 and 4GB of ram, readyboost only helps if you have 1GB or less of ram. it really does help if you have 512MB or so, but for 2GB and above it doesnt do much.



It should help out the page file by making it faster by using the jump drive more than the HDD.  Any way to confirm this?




LonGun said:


> so I can safely go into the Services and Stop and Disable that SuperFetch running?



Don't think you want to do that, Superfetch realy makes things run smoother/faster.


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## LonGun (Sep 13, 2007)

Namslas90 said:


> It should help out the page file by making it faster by using the jump drive more than the HDD.  Any way to confirm this?
> 
> 
> 
> ...



OMG thank you.


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## alexp999 (Sep 13, 2007)

effmaster said:


> Just so you know i own the full version of CoD2 and not some demo of it
> 
> But thanks all the same wont have time tonight but maybe tomorrow or this weekend when i have more time



NP, shouldnt make a difference between the DEMO and full version anyway. Just googled it, didn;t notice it was for the demo, lol!


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## alexp999 (Sep 13, 2007)

Namslas90 said:


> Don't think you want to do that, Superfetch realy makes things run smoother/faster.



Well, since I have done these tweaks and disabled and emptied superfetch, I have found Vista runs smoother and faster, maybe it depends on what programs you run, even stuff like photoshop runs the same, games have defo seen an improvement.

Just a quick question on another note tho. I have found enabling vertical sync in HL2 really pulls down framte rate, and I mean below the refresh rate. But without it it shoots up well above refresh rate. My quick question is that would it be better to have v sync off but set max fps to the refresh rate of the monitor? To avoid horizontal tearing? If so is there anyway of loading it into the autoexec file so i dont have to enter the dev console and enter it everytime i start the game?

Thanks.


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## Mussels (Sep 13, 2007)

I beleive it depends on the system - because i have a lot of ram, superfetch is awesome. It uses my ram, without pushing anything else out of the way.

on 512-1GB systems, superfetch may fight for the memory and cause problems.

Readyboost helps if you page a lot, but in these situations its best to lower your ram usage by disabling superfect and other services and quitting apps, because flash drives have low access times - NOT high bandwidth. Its certainly not going to help gaming out.

alex: vsync on is just slow. you get tearing with it off, but quite an FPS boost. Vsync never really did cap it perfectly, as it makes the system do a lot more work to keep it all looking smooth.


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## effmaster (Sep 13, 2007)

alexp999 said:


> Here you go, I looked it up:
> 
> Command to Show FPS
> Shows your Frames Per Second in the game. Useful for benchmarks and likewise.
> ...



Thanks it works now
noq about those folders


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