All Tasks and Memory usage in Windows 7 – How much RAM Windows 7 need?
At PDC a netbook with 1GB of RAM was showcased running Windows 7 just fine.1GB of RAM isn't much these days, but still I kept wondering how much RAM does Windows 7 really need? I created a VM and gave it 700MB of RAM. It booted just fine and windows idle with no apps were using 360-400MB of ram. (That is just 50% of the total!)Then I decided to open 10 explorer windows just to see what usage it would go up to. With the 10 windows the ram usage went from 400MB to 425MB.
But I didn't want to stop there, I wanted to find out when the prefetch-applications stopped and try to find the "static" amount of RAM that Windows 7 needs.* I shut the system down and set the RAM to 500MB and booted back up. Now the system used 290MB with 210MB to spare. Then i rebooted it with 300MB available RAM. To be honest, the boot wasn't happy about just getting 300MB to work with and the boot slowed down for quite some time. But when it finally got into the system it went to 250MB of RAM at idle.
Win7 consumes always in IDLE 40% of total RAM
but later it starts to store data of programs in RAM
so it can run them faster later
but on my dissapointment (RTM build 7600)
it doesnt flush unnecessary data from RAM
unless you reboot, so ben if MS is braging about
their superior memory managment over XP in 7
i find it inferior
its more logical to use memory when you need it and for what you need it and not just for the sakes that if use "may" later run app so it will run faster... what if i wont use same app anymore in current session ?
its just useles choke on system
This is interesting. It suggests that Linux distros had better be careful if they want to be able to continue to claim that Linux has a much smaller RAM footprint than Windows. A big, fully-featured, Linux desk-top would really creak and groan with as little RAM as 300MB.