Windows 7 64-bit Ram usage

[JDB4LFE]

Ok so I looked at some stuff around the internet, but little to no avail I could find nothing about my issue. I have 8gb of ram installed but my resourced monitor as well as HWinfo64 tell me i can only use 6b of it. When looking at my windows properties it tells me I have 8gb of ram installed. When looking at my resource monitor, it tells me 5.4gb available. HWinfo64 tells me the same thing. I'm not completely sure what's going on, but it's been like this for a little while now. Occasionally it tells me i can use over 6gb, but i've never been able to fully utilize the full 8gb for one reason or another. I have 4x2gb ram sticks installed.

[Owen]

Running Windows takes up RAM ;)

[Glenwing]

Only 5.3GB is available because the rest of it is in use, by Windows.

[dlf]

That should be what? About 20 - 30% of the RAM, I think? When I first booted this system up I got up 15-20% of my 8 GB of RAM used.

[grayperview]

Perfectly normal, you have firefox, flash and steam open, they are using a fair bit of ram, fresh boot up on my windows 7 will use 1.6 to 1.8GB, once you start running program obviously it will use more.

[Leonard]

Yes i find something is strange to but it isn't what you are thinking. You do have all 8gb showing up. If you are at idle all your free ram capacity would not be in stand by.Do you have any virtual machines or drives loaded? Any RAM disks created? Have you just copied plenty files to some where? If not i think you have a problem. Was this problem new or always like this? I use windows 764bit SP1 and my resource monitor is way different. I have 16Gb of RAM but my In Use memory = 2342MB, Stand by memory = 1628MB and Free memory = 12009MB.

[mvitkun]

Ok so I looked at some stuff around the internet, but little to no avail I could find nothing about my issue. I have 8gb of ram installed but my resourced monitor as well as HWinfo64 tell me i can only use 6b of it. When looking at my windows properties it tells me I have 8gb of ram installed. When looking at my resource monitor, it tells me 5.4gb available. HWinfo64 tells me the same thing. I'm not completely sure what's going on, but it's been like this for a little while now. Occasionally it tells me i can use over 6gb, but i've never been able to fully utilize the full 8gb for one reason or another. I have 4x2gb ram sticks installed.

try closing 

-firefox

-steam

-origin

then see how much is available.

 

you could also try turning off Aero along with them and see if that makes a significant difference.

 

you could reinstall windows and see if that makes a difference.

 

if it bothers you so much you could install a Linux distro as most of them use significantly less than windows does.

 

 

with nothing open,aside from afterburner,core temp,nvidia control panel,and task manager on my main pc (win 7 64 bit) I have 1.6GB usage,

having 5+ tabs open in chrome,along with Rdio/Spotify takes me up to around 2.2-2.4GB.

 

so you having 2.8GB usage with firefox,steam,and origin open (among other things) isn't very surprising.

 

having a decent amount of files cached in the ram at any given time is typically a good thing,it means that if you open a program,navigate windows,reopen something that was recently closed,it will be more responsive.

 

also if you take out 4GB of ram windows may lower the amount cached .

 

for example my media pc has 4GB ram and win 8 64 bit....it's using 1.3GB ram with 

-afterburner

-core temp

-5 tabs in chrome (hulu and YT among those 5,YT being active at 720p,with 2 LTT tabs,and KH13 in the last)

 

so yeah...if you want to have lower ram usage

-use linux

-turn off Aero

-turn off background programs

-install less ram

-use chrome rather than firefox (firefox uses more memory)

-turn off background

[sotiris.bos]

Windows 7 uses some kind of a ramdisk to cache files and stuff so the 8gb will never be fully available.

[JDB4LFE]

hmm ok thanks guys. seems its just something to help make the OS run faster. I'm ok with that :) guess i'll be looking to upgrade my amount of ram eventually ^_^

[PCBudgetSolutions]

Windows uses about 1GB of ram.  Here's what you can do:

Go to Start

In the search box type msconfig

Click on startup

Then uncheck everything and reboot.

Then your ram should be around 1GB

[penance]

Are you confusing available with total, or you asking why you are using 2gb of ram? Total= Available+In Use . I may have been misunderstanding what you are asking though, just looking at the pictures it looked like you thought available and total were the same.

[Darell3]

After a fresh install for me windows only uses 970mb of ram. Once i install of my stuff it uses 1.2gb.