Report: Most Windows 7 PCs Max Out RAM [UPD]
RAM, bam, thank you ma'am!
Update: It's come to light that the Devil Mountain Software's CTO, Craig Barth, doesn't truly exist and is actually an InfoWorld contributor named Randall C. Kennedy. Read more about the scandal here.
When I pay the money to drop at least 6GB of RAM into my system, I want it all to be put to use. Compared to Windows XP, both Windows Vista and Windows 7 make more active use of system memory. But according to Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet) CTO, Craig Barth, that sort of RAM management results in undesirable performance.
According to the Computerworld report, XPnet found that 40 percent of its Windows XP machines ran into low-memory situations, while 86 percent of its Windows 7 machines are regularly consuming 90 percent to 95 percent of their available RAM.
Barth said that the hungry RAM consumption of Windows 7 result in slow-downs. "The vast majority of Windows 7 machines over the last several months are very heavily-memory saturated," he said. "From a performance standpoint, that has an immediate impact on the machine."
"This is alarming," Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. "For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is."
Alarming findings aside, XPnet observed that Windows 7 PCs sport an average of 3.3GB of RAM, compared to 1.7GB for Windows XP and 2.7GB for Windows Vista machines.
We recall that the design of Windows Vista (and by extension, Windows 7) has it consuming more RAM for practical, useful purposes rather than letting it sit idle. Nevertheless, we have contacted Microsoft for an official answer to this memory issue. More to come.

Current RAM Consumption with Google Chrome, Word 2010 open:
1.37GB.
Seems ridiculously high to me. Right?
And that's for Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, with Intel Core2Duo P8700... just for reference.
I may also add I slim down the GUI a lot. I use Linux fluxbox on my other partition...
http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/Linux%20Memory%20Management.htm
I think these kids don't understand that there may be some tuning required (plus using x64 to access all your RAM).
Also - I would like to see something more than "seems sluggish". My Smoothwall server cycles it's RAM usage (going to 99% at times) and it's running - you guessed - s00pah!
You really shouldn't be running x64 on 4GB - you should double that if possible. x64 takes up more RAM for the same applications than if you were running the 32bit version. I can't remember where but I remember seeing the breakpoint between 32 and 64 bit versions and I think (don't quote me on it though) you had to be over 6GB of RAM to make the x64 version worthwhile.
I run 64 bit on 4GB of ram because it's more secure/stable, not because of memory mapping.
Thanks I never knew that. I will double check that for sure.
Since everyone else is listing what they are running, I max out at 3.5 GB of RAM running GTA 4 with Steam, Xfire, and Vent running on 64 bit Windows 7 with 8 total GB of RAM.
this seems like a good article opportunity for Toms... just saying.
??
My guess is a large part of the test group is running 1 or 2GB of RAM which in theory should be enough for nearly everything an educated end user would ever need but, then look how much bloatware comes with store bought PCs/laptops killing any overhead room they thought they had. We need more information on this "data".
Yup. For example, the old 17 year old Windows Bug/hole didn't affect x64 OSes.
But even on my old computer which only has 1gb of ram. Every thing seems just as smooth with win7 as it did with xp.
My gaming PC has 8GB with swapfile turned off as well, and running Mass Effect 2 with the usual stuff in the background (AV/IE/etc...) it hasn't cracked the 45% utilization (based on both G15 keyboard LCD resource monitor & Performance counters with W7). It idles at around 1.4GB. My laptops idle at about 800MB.
And none of them are even close to be considered slow, maybe a TAD slower than XP on boot, but after that it's no difference.
Obviously it'll take more than XP... did they expect a friggin' miracle? Did 95 take less RAM than 3.1? But 90-95%? hell no.
No oconnellda it is not high. Keep in mind that there might be other stuff running in the background services etc. Plus todays software requires more memory to call so why should not a OS do the same. We want faster CPU more HDD space, put large amounts of ram in the computer but want the OS to use nothing. All this doesn't make sense.