I have Windows Vista SP1 running on my seccond computer, a 2year old Dell XPS with 2GB of ram and a 3.4ghz P4  
 
cpu and the monitor that shows ram and cpu usage never goes under 49% ram usage....ever! Even when I have no  
 
programs running its constantly at 50-55%  
 
I'm no expert but Vista can't be that big of a ram hog, what can I do (other than installing more ram) to help free  
 
up some of the ram.
 
 
Thanks-Chris

You can't. Vista is supposed to use that much. The only thing you can do is not run background programs, like antivirus. But that really won't help much since Vista itself is the one using up most of it. You can easily dump ram using some third party utilities, but that'll just slow down your computer to a crawl until all the programs eventually reclaim the ram freed, which makes it pointless.

Buy more ram.

Vista is supposed to use huge amounts of RAM all the time because it loads all the programs in that you might use, so they launch quicker.
 
Unused RAM is wasted when it could be used to speed up the system, and it's not like it slows anything down, as it takes as much time to overwrite empty memory as it does full memory.

 
Correct.  
Don't worry because as stated above, Vista will release many of those resources for applications when needed by other applications.
 
However, Vista will always use a bit more RAM than XP.
If you can get yourself up to 3gb w/o spending too much that may help you quite a bit.

you guys are idiots

 
I don't think I can upgrade the ram, its  ddr 2 really slow ram, slower than 533mhz ram and I don't even know where I could even find that old ram.

 
Don't spoil it by letting them know.  
 
Have you checked this thread out?
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] ing-memory

Run Vista = Buy More RAM... I have 4 Gig (shows 3.2+ as it should) and it runs at idle using 30% to 40%. Vista likes lots of RAM it's that simple.

 
yes it can.  You will notice that Vista chugs on for about 45 seconds after you'd think it was done booting / loading.   This is where superfetch loads anything and everything it thinks you might use that day.  Pretty good idea if you are a robot and do the same tasks at the same time every day but not if you don't follow a pattern.  Ina ctuality it has much less of an effect **normally** than you would think it would.
 
As for the "it don't matter, that's not quite true.  Open up your Task Manager thingie and, under options, add the columns to show both memory and virtual memory.  You will see that no matter how much RAM you have free, you will see about half of each programs memory footprint is written out to virtual memory.  So when you load something, it's not just writing over RAM memory.  The stuff in memory is paged out and written to virtual memory BEFORE that memory is written over.  On every day program tasks, this is no biggie.  In "big programs" like AutoCAD, Photoshop etc, it **can** be an issue.  In gaming, it definitely is an issue.
 
There's enough benchmarks and sites which have published the results when turning Superfetch off or just modifying the settings for it.  There's registry setting for superfetch that changes how superfetch works.  
 
http://dotnetwizard.net/?p=147
 
   A. Goto: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
   B. you should see two keys called enable superfetch and enable prefetch, both having the default values of 3.
   C. change both the values according to the below info and your preference.
 
0:  Disabled
1: Caches Boot files only.
2: Caches Boot files and Program files (this is the best setting for most systems, gives maximum performance with minimum resource hog)
3: Caches all files (Default setting, takes maximum resources)
 
So, I'd try dropping those settings down from 3 to 2 and see if you are happier.
 

 
http://asia.cnet.com/crave/2007/09 [...] sta-to-xp/        
 
Simply put, each new OS requires more RAM.  If you were OK with 1 GB in Win2k, you needed 2 GB in XP for a comparable experience.....if you were content with 2 GB in XP, get at least 4 GB with Vista....It won't be as fast as XP on the same hardware....but XP with hardware from XP's day w/ 2 GB is comparable to Vista on hardware from Vista's era w/ 4 GB.

Vista Ultimate 32bit currently only uses 35% of my 2gigs after about 10-20 min of booting.  I'm fine with that.  When I first loaded this OS I think it was using close to 65% but my computer is awesome and it learned to use less resources.  

If you can get an extra 1k (2x512MB) cheap for your machine for Vista 32 you are better just upgrading far as that.  I just paid £17 two weeks ago for two dr2 6400 512k ram to take me up to 3GB.  Going up to 4GB is only worth it if you cant get cheap enough 512k memory as part of your 4GB will be wasted.
 
As I write this I have Guild Wars running in the background and three explorer windows open and Im only using about 13% cpu and about 47% ram.  So your processor is also a major problem.  Im using a Quad 6600 at 2.4mhz and a much cheaper Duo6600 I assume would show similar results.  Can you afford to upgrade your cpu?