How Much memory should vista use when your not running anything?

[link_419]

hello, im a noob and i tried looking for an answer to my question before i posted it. Ill be honest i didnt search to WHOLE thing but im limited with time right now so might have already been answered. anyway this is my situation i just got a new laptop and its a :

-HP Pavilion dv5 -1138nr Laptop ( i got it pretty cheap brand new for $600)
-Windows vista home premium 64-Bit
-Intel Core 2 Duo
-4GB installed out of 8GB possible
-processor speed 2GHz

alright so those are the specs and ive been trying to optimize the computer myself by getting rid of junk programs that i dont need. So ive done what i could so far with out getting rid of things that wont mess up my pc. I also disabled the windows side bar as well. So...when im not running anything and when the computer is just running by itself it is using 1.30 GB of memory. My question was is it supposed to be using less memory then that when im not running anything. Or What is the average memory usage you guys have been running for those of you with mabey the same conditions as my pc, can i get it down any lower with out messing with vista itself anymore? I have a buddy that said he got his running at supposably 400MB. Is that possible with vista????? i mean the recomended requirements say that you need 1GB to run right? well any good feed back would be well appreciated. This is my first time optimizing my own computer so im in need of help. Thank you.

 

[notherdude]

Vista has a new feature called 'superfetch' - the system aggressively and intelligently loads frequently used code into ram so that it won't have to fetched from the hard drive. This is why my 8 gig system currently is consuming three gig of RAM even though I am just surfing and running the usual bckg apps at the moment. It is also why my usual software starts up faster on Vista then it does on my XP 64 install on the same machine. It is also the case that Vista allows this superfetch cache memory to be overwritten by apps if and when they need it. So nothing is lost by allowing it to do what it is supposed to do.

Trying to get Vista down to some absolute minimum of ram consumption is for the most part a fool's quest. If you only had 1 gig of RAM in your machine I could see maybe trying to tweak it a bit but You have plenty of RAM and anything you unload from RAM at this point will probably just slow you down. There are Vista machines running with 512 mg RAM so I assume it must be theoretically possible to get down to that 400 meg number or close to it but I also assume that this means you will be making a lot of trips to the page file on the hard drive which will slow it down horribly. The RAM is there to be used not doled out like a miser. Optimizing for minimum RAM consumption is an old habit going back to the days of DOS when it really mattered and then somewhat even through the early XP days when 256 meg was standard issue and 512 was a luxury. Those days are over now.