Quote:
Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt
I recently migrated from XP to win7 x64. I have an i7 920 with 3GB of DDR3, almost everything runs better in win7 than it did in XP and it uses up between 800 and 1000MB of RAM in idle. That's right, win7 x64 uses up less than a gig on my system.
As for why i have 3GB of RAM, when i bought my system a couple of years ago there was no win7 yet. Having worked with Vista while serving my army/conscription term i wasn't going to touch them with a 10 foot pole (there's nothing worse than Vista acting up when an air force brigadier with a couple thousand flying hours in mirage 2000s is waiting for his weekly briefing slides  ).
As for the alternatives, XP 32 bit couldn't "see" more than a total of 4GB of system RAM+GPU RAM due to address space limitations (XP 64 was out of the question due to driver issues) and i already had a GPU with 1GB of RAM, plus the i7 and mobo have that triple channel capability, so i ended up getting 3 sticks of 1GB each.
Back to idle memory usage, maybe it depends on the amount of total RAM, who knows? Maybe the OS reserves more RAM for system tasks if it detects you have some to spare, could that be possible? |
Yeo, Vista was a nightmare and I avoided it like the plague after my first experiences with it. I loved xp, but I love win7 far more. I am not sure exactly why its using the 2gb, it obviously then is dependant on some other factor. What version of the OS do you have? Home caps out at 16gb max addressable ram, prof/other versions have a cap over 100gb, that might be the reason... (just speculating).
As for the xp ram, yea it couldnt see more than 4. I had 4 in and it showed up as 3, the missing gig is added as additional system reserve memory, you have to fiddle with the BIOS / OS I believe to get it working. But ram now is so incredibly cheap that you should be able to get 6-8gb of ddr3 for around/under $100. I just went crazy because my last machine went for a good 6 years before the gpu died and since it was time to upgrade, I decided I wanted to plan for a long life span
*oh btw the 2gb number is from a range of sources, but just ones I can glance at now is the Intel CPU/Ram monitoring app + my G15 has a ram/cpu monitoring mode on it which gives me the same numbers (except on CPU's since the KB is a bit old).