Unknown RAM usage.

[Trenton_Lister]

A member of staff is having speed troubles with his Vista laptop. The initial cause of this I found, however after solving it, still found that 60% of 1GB of RAM is still in use, yet there is nothing in the processes that is showing what could possibly be using it. All the running processes shown do not even total 10%. Other than a possible virus, is there any other theories on what could possibly be causing this?

[rhyds]

Are you showing tasks from all users?

[Quackers]

This is normal Vista uses RAM very differently to any other version of Windows.

[Trenton_Lister]

There is only one user account on the machine.

And its Vista Home 32bit

[powdarrmonkey]

It sounds about normal. Vista's base memory footprint is huuuuge (the cynic in me thinks it's probably all pretty graphics).

[Geoff]

It's because vista uses spare memory as a file cache. Much like my Linux boxes have been doing for the last 15 years.

Here's a random blog I found explaining it better than I can be bothered to.

Coding Horror: Why Does Vista Use All My Memory?

[PeterW]

As already stated its quite normal, its Windows Superfetch caching frequently used programs to ram. It should release it if needed.

[Trenton_Lister]

Thanks all, reassured me now I know what its likely to be.