EggXpert

Hello all Im in a pickle. All of the sudden Im using 400mb of ram when idle. And I kwon this isn't normal since I already killed unnecessary startup and services after I installed winXP but this happend after that. Right now besides the normal win apps Im running avast, super anti sypware, peer gaurdian 2, lclock and the ati drivers. I alredy scanned for viruses and spy but stil no luck. When I added up the ram used by the progs it was about 198 so where is the other 200 megs.

 

Disable these one by one avast, super anti sypware, peer gaurdian 2, lclock. Especially the last two are not needed in start up. I would disable both and see what you get back for RAM.

Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to open task manager, once open click the processes tab click user name add up yours then add up the system.

 

It's normal. Windows XP uses some RAM to cache recently read data from the hard drive..  RAM is thousands of times faster than a hard drive with a spinning platter, so if you closed down those programs and started them up again, Windows will be able to load the application much quicker than the first time you started it.  

One of the primary duties of a good operating system is to make the best use of available resources.  Leaving RAM empty and unutilized when it could be caching recently read contents off of your hard drive would be a big waste of resources.   Since RAM uses the same amount of power no matter what, leaving it empty does absolutely NOTHING for you.. 

In fact, having lots of empty RAM (not using it to cache recently read data from the slow hard drive) will serious slow down your performance.  

Windows is smart enough to know that if an application requests / needs memory, and there's empty memory available, then it will assign the empty memory to the application.  If there's no empty memory available, it will flush out some of the RAM it's using as hard drive cache and then give it to the application..  

Essentially, Windows creates a "RAM DISK" on the fly if you've got excessive amounts of free Empty RAM and uses it to accelerate recently loaded data from the hard drive, even if the data is not currently used in any applications. Since flushing out RAM is thousands of times faster than waiting for the platter on your hard drive to spin to the correct sector and the head to move to the correct position, having memory allocated as disk cache does not slow down your system at all.

Unlike a traditional RAM DISK, the memory allocated to disk cache by Windows will grow and shrink rapidly as the amount of unused memory changes. Although having a disk cache in your RAM does boost loading performance anywhere from 1-15%, it is much better than leaving the memory empty and getting no performance boost for all that RAM that you spent your money on.

If you're interested in this kind of thing, buy a good book on Operating System design. Believe it or not, Windows XP is doing exactly what a well designed Operating System is supposed to. 

Learned.  and XP does use that much memory when idle and if you run some apps it is almost the same as idle. that is quite interesting. yep, a good os will take a full advantage of the resources.  but Vista also use a lot of memory too when idle.

Yep, can't agree with intelguy more. Vista does use a lot more ram. My system has 2 gigs and it is using 1 gig without anything open. The reason is that it holds more memory in cache than XP.