Clearing/Releasing RAM in Win 7?

[Chilli]

On my Win 7 machine, quad core, 3gb Ram, the CPU usage will go up to around 90% when running several programs. I would expect this, but when I close almost all the programs it's still saying RAM usage is 70-80%. There's hardly anything running in the background and when I turn on the computer after shutting down, it'll start out at around 30-40% RAM usage.

Am I missing something? Shouldn't the RAM usage go down after closing the programs consuming the RAM? Is there a good way to clear the RAM and free it up? What do you recommend.

Thanks

 

[parker.casey]

That's normal behaviour, as far as I'm aware. Free RAM is useless RAM. Windows 7 manages RAM pretty well, by way of using as much as you throw at it. Leave the poor thing alone, I'd say.

 

[angry_geek]

Win 7 64 bit is designed to run with at least 4 gb RAM. If you're running 64 bit on 3 gb, it will eat up most of your memory. By the way, why run a quad-core with only 3 gb of RAM? Not criticizing, just haven't really seen a configuration like that. You may think about adding some RAM. It's dirt cheap these days.

 

[rrnut65]

Windows 7 is very efficient when it comes to ram usage. Compared to Vista, Microsoft got it right. I have system running Windows 7 64 bit with only 2GB of ram and they are very snappy and quick. Usage of 40% to 60% is norm but yours seems high. If I were you and want to investigate what was using the ram I would start with Sysinternals Process Explorer. It's owned by Microsoft and is free to download. Windows 7 Resource Monitor is very good as well. With either one you can view the processes running on the system as well as each processes memory usage. This way you could see where the memory is being used hopefully giving you a clue how to attack the problem.

 

[parker.casey]

RAM being FREE is a problem, folks ... just think for a minute. You'll understand why.

A perfect config has no free RAM, and responds near instantly.

 

[Ccomp5950]

More than likely you are seeing windows using the ram as cache, which is great usage and nothing to be worried about.

If that memory should be needed for an active process you will see windows dump the cache.

Vista and 7 do this, there was an article that came out when someone writing it didn't understand the concept of caching, so they assumed cached ram would not be released and didn't count cache holding ram to be free and posted graphs and all sorts of things to show Vista was a memory hog (it is, just not in the way they made it out to be) and even took up more ram WHEN YOU ADDED MORE (oh the horror).

 

[MobileTechie]

My W7 64bi only takes about 1.5GB of RAM when idling.

Anyway, if you're worried about it. Windows comes with good resource monitoring now so it's simple to see what is using it up.