2gb-> 4gb

[redddraggon]

at 2GB in Vista I had memory usage at around 40%, with 4GB it seems to have dropped to only 36%

It's 64bit vista and all the memory is definitely being recognised.

Wierd?

[aidanjt]

Not really, there's only so much memory it needs to consume, even Vista has it's limits on resource consumption

[markymicro]

They say Vista is memory hungry.

[redddraggon]

Surely if I have twice the memory, the utilisation of memory should halve?

[aidanjt]

It does, plus Vista utilises more of the new memory for caching and buffers just like a real operating system should do. It's not 'unusable' memory, the cache and buffers grow and shrink depending on the userspace applications resource usage.

[dave87]

There was an interesting article on this, and basically the end point was this;

"The question we will be asking, is not why Vista uses so much memory, but why previous incarnations of Windows used it so damn inefficiently."

Vista, at least the simple explanation of it, preloads stuff it thinks you are going to use into memory. Obviously, the more memory you have, the more it can preload. This is one of the ways Vista is meant to work quicker. However the flip side of this is higher memory usage, even just after startup. The solution to this, and the reason why there is no slow down in comparison to similar memory utilisation in XP is that it is just as quick to boot useless info out of memory, where XP would have held onto it.

[DeludedGuy]

So 4gb > 2gb