The rule of thumb, no matter how much memory you have in your system is that Windows is gonna want as much as it can possibly use. It doesn’t matter if you have 1 gig or 8 gig, Windows itself will try and keep as much memory for itself as it can. Robbing memory hogging applications of total available memory.
From time to time I do get “virtual memory too low...” messages. I have read what I can find and understand about it. Generally, I just let it be and continue about my business.
Running a fairly old Dell here. All I ever did to it was install additional RAM. I did get a speed upgrade to 10 Mbs recently, but was seeing little evidence until I installed this bets upgrade of Firefox
Although the memory footprint of Windows has always been a bit high (most often having to do with hardware reservations, third party drivers and what-not) what you describe is a myth perpetuated by people who own Windows machines lacking an adequate amount of RAM.
And frankly, the memory management of 7 is pretty impressive. Even with Cubase 5 Rewired to Reason 4 and Miroslav Philharmonik, I've only been able to push 5.2 Gigs.
Although, I've hit around 20 with a VM server on Win Server 2008. lol
The rule of thumb, no matter how much memory you have in your system is that Windows is gonna want as much as it can possibly use. It doesn’t matter if you have 1 gig or 8 gig, Windows itself will try and keep as much memory for itself as it can. Robbing memory hogging applications of total available memory.
Bingo! We have a winner!
A Simple way to prove that, is by removing your Ram, one at a time-then watch your Task Manager, or whatever you use to monitor your usage with. The amount, in percentage, that Windows uses will go down and, conversely, as you reinstall Ram, it will go up. (that's one of those "ancient Chinese secrets-LOL)
So, how to avoid this? Well, you can't really. But, you can mitigate it to a point. Here's how...
Go to
Priority Watch , and download their neat little utility called Prio. Prio allows you to set the priority of each service running, and you can save that configuration so it loads each time you boot.
For instance, I don't need my printer ink monitor to have the same level of priority as I do say, FireFox, so I reduced it to Low, and saved it that way. In addition, it has a few other nifty tricks up it's sleeves (assuming it has two arms-haha), such as when you highlight a running service, like svchost, it will give up a balloon that tells you just what svchost is supporting at the moment. There are many other uses, as well, go there and read up on it, download it, use it, it's well worth the price of FREE!
Let's not forget, the really great
SysInternals Process Explorer , which is now owned by MS. For "seeing" what's running under the hood and how much of your resources it's using and what it's interacting with, it's a fantastic utility.