Since it's release back in 2007, computer users have cursed the name of Windows Vista. From update loops to unexplainable slowness and extremely high memory usage. Although I have not done enough research yet to answer all of those questions, I have read some articles explaining how your memory is utilized by Windows.
Before being able to understand this high memory usage "problem", you must first understand what memory (aka. RAM or Random Access Memory) actually is. The best metaphor I like to offer people to explain RAM is as follows. Your hard drive acts like a filing cabinet where files and programs are kept organized in an orderly fashion, per-say. The RAM is like your desk. The more RAM your computer has is like having a bigger desk, and the same for the hard drive size compared to the filing cabinet. When you need to work on a particular file, you remove it from the filing cabinet and place it on your desk. Should you need additional information or files from the filing cabinet, you will remove those and place those on the desk as well. At some point, your desk will become cluttered and things will need to be put into an organized temporary folder back in the filing cabinet (this is similar to what's called a pagefile). When you are done with all of those files, you place them back into the filing cabinet for permanent storage.
Your computer works likewise. Programs and files you access are loaded from the hard drive into memory. Lesser used files will be moved into the paging file to free physical memory. When a computer runs out of memory, or a program is no longer being used, the computer may remove those files from memory/pagefile and place them back into the hard drive for permanent storage, thus freeing up available memory. When you shut your computer down, everything in memory and the paging file are put back into the hard drive. If your computer does not have enough memory to handle the process that are being demanded (Antivirus, Internet browser, games, word processor, background services, background programs, etc) then your computer is going to do a lot of hard drive reading and writing which is much slower than just accessing the memory. To fix this, you have two options. Stop a lot of processes or close programs to clear them from memory and free up memory for other things. Or two, you can install additional memory if your computer supports it. This is a common fix for a lot of slow running computers.
Now, on to explain why Windows Vista has failed miserably as the predecessor of Windows 7. To twist your idea of what memory is a little bit more, think of it like cache (or temporary storage). Typically, with cache storage, you want this to be completely full of commonly accessed data for quicker access to prevent as much hard drive read/writing as possible, thus causing faster processing. As of Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced a new feature called SuperFetch. What this feature does is it looks to see what applications have been used most commonly and will try and fill as much of your physical memory with this data in an attempt to make Windows Vista faster for you. However, for those of you who use large memory intensive programs or games, you may find this to be a bad feature since you then have to wait for Windows to free up memory for your application. In Windows 7, they kept the same SuperFetch feature, but they reduced it's processing priority allowing your other processes to claim memory before SuperFetch tries and fills it all up. I think this is one of the biggest fixes that was made for Windows 7 to operate better than Windows Vista. From what I have seen, Windows 7 on a cold boot with very little starting up at boot other than the virus scan will use a minimal amount of memory compared to your total available system memory. However, with the same configuration in Windows Vista and the same conditions, within a few minutes of booting the memory will appear to be fully maxed out or close to. This is SuperFetch kicking in and doing its job to help you out.
This SuperFetch feature can be disabled in the Services console (services.msc), but it is not recommended for non-advanced users to modify this setting.
Hope you have found this information to be helpful. Please email us your feedback and thanks for reading!
Sources:
Windows 7 SuperFetch:
Windows Vista SuperFetch:
