LKBEN10756: Windows Vista Performance Enhancement with SuperFetch

Symptom

In Taskmanager there is almost no "free memory", although there ought to be plenty

Cause

Vista Memory Management uses physical memory (RAM) different than predecessors

Solution

In short: if you see only a few megabytes free in your Taskmanager - Performance view, although hardly any applications are opened, it's not a bug - Vista is not devouring all this RAM, it just uses it differently.

In short:

While former Windows Versions "used" available RAM for Applications when needed and (hopefully) freed it upon closing applications, Vista "SuperFetch" Technology uses all of your RAM for Memory Management (like a Cache) and therefore does not show much free RAM. However, if you look at the graphics or the Ressourcemonitor, you can pretty much figure out, how much your system uses.

About the Author

Wim Peeters is electronics engineer with an additional master in IT and over 30 years of experience, including time spent in support, development, consulting, training and database administration. Wim has worked with SQL Server since version 6.5. He has developed in C/C++, Java and C# on Windows and Linux. He writes knowledge base articles to solve IT problems and publishes them on the Lubby Knowledge Platform.

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