slim down Vista's fat backside?

[Joe 90]

http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/88/fatvistaqq4.th.jpg (http://img3.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fatvistaqq4.jpg)

its really starting to annoy me know.... vista will happily sit on 3 out of my 4GBs of memory when all i have open is firefox and a few things in the sys tray like MSN, a bandwidth monitor, ESET AV etc....

now maybe previously i was doing something that meant loading up a load of files to run photoshop or something, but now i'm not and i'd like some performance back!!

i'm getting issues simply using windows explorer and extracting an ISO, I assume, because of this lack of available memory.

is there any way to release some memory? and i don't want to have to constantly take the default MS fix of a reboot!

[Feek]

Erm.

Looks to me as though you're using around 700Mb of memory and Vista is using 3.2Gb for it's caching which will be immediately freed up if you open an application which isn't isn't in the cache. I really don't see a problem with those memory settings, it's just SuperFetch (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/superfetch.aspx) doing what SuperFetch does (and I always found it worked really well).

[Daz]

Yeah, gonna say, the issue shouldn't be that the OS is grabbing a lot of memory, so long as it free's it up when it's needed by something else. Rather that than have memory sat there doing nothing.

However, that one svchost is using a lot of memory. Get Process Explorer (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx), and find out what that actually is.

[Mark]

Indeed. I'd rather Vista was actually making good use of RAM for caching programs and the like than having it sit there idle. Seems like it's doing what it should to me. :)

[Joe 90]

it's just SuperFetch (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/superfetch.aspx) doing what SuperFetch does (and I always found it worked really well).
aye i'm aware of that, but it didn't seem to be helping the other day when i loaded up a game and it was loading really slow as I was moving about. And as i said, explorer is running really slow and prone to crashing when simply navigating through folders.

svchost is using a lot of memory.
that particular svchost process seems to be running MS Sync Centre & Windows Live\Contacts\wlcomm.exe - not too sure what that is, but i guess its MSN related and its currently sat on 200mb.