Thread: How to tell if you need more RAM...

How to tell if you need more RAM..





Here's how:

Press the Ctrl? + Alt + Delete key. Now click on Task Manager and select the Performance tab. Look just under midway down on the right and you will see a box labeled ?Physical Memory (K). Read the Total right under that. That is your installed memory (in kilobytes). If you want to convert it to MB, divide it by 1024. Now look at the box to it;s left that says Commit Charge (K). The total there will be how much memory is being used. You will also see a Peak under that total which tells the highest amount of memory used since the last reboot. If the Peak is lower than the Physical Memory total, then you don?t need additional memory. If the total Commit Charge is higher than the Physical Memory Total, then additional memory would give you a significant performance boost because of how much of the memory your system is using with the Operating System and applications.

I have vista and it has a different interface(or something like that) in the taskmanager, so I'm afraid this doesn't "work" on vista. But I do have a Q! In the taskmanager, the "Physical Memory:" is like always around 40% for me. The CPU usage is however very low all the time(mainly because of my Quadcore@2.6,but that's another story;)). Is it normal to have such high memory usage?

Vista tends to allocate memory differently, it gives running programs a bigger slice of the pie in effect when they first open rather than xp which will start with just what they need and then increase the amount of memory used as needed. So depending on the amount of processes you are running 40% could very well be normal.

So does this not work with Vista?