I just recently purchased a laptop with Windows 8, and I could really use some help figuring this silly thing out. This will probably the first post of many because it's been no longer than 2 days and i've run into more problems with this machine and OS than I have in the past year of using my desktop.

My first problem was this:

This laptop came equipped with a whopping 12GB of RAM, and an i7 processor clocked at 2.4ghz. What confused me is the memory usage when I was simply downloading games with Steam and Origin. I took a peek at the memory usage in task manager, with only 3 programs running, 80% of my total RAM - 9GBs of my 12GBs of RAM - was being used. Checking the processes tab, I filtered the list of running programs from highest to lowest for reserved memory, the highest being steam and origin both under 200MB, and the rest collectively no more than 500MB.

After closing Steam and Origin, the collective memory usage dropped below 15%. My question is, how do two programs, downloading, use 7-8GB of RAM, and how come that memory usage is not reported in the performance tab?

Any information or assistance is appreciated.

Hi and welcome to the community.

Don't know if I can explain this well or even correctly but I'll give it a shot.

First off Steam is very aggressive as to taking available system resources. Since you have plenty of resources this is not a bad thing. You have 12gig of RAM and only 9 was being used. In all honesty that means that 3gig was being wasted as unused RAM is wasted RAM. If your system had 4gig things would still work but not quite as well as the paging file would be used much more (paging file == virtual memory). Since you have enough RAM to not need the paging file much your memory usage will look elevated but on a system with less RAM the same thing would be going on except that there would be a lot more tossing and fetching between the RAM and paging file which would likely mean a bit of drop in overall performance.

If the resources are there there is nothing wrong with the system making use of those resources. In fact I'd be more inclined to suspect an issue if the resources were not being used.

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That's right. What's the point of having lots of memory if not to use it? In addition to what Jay said, Windows has very sophisticated memory algorithms it uses to have things in memory that you might use. It tries to predict what you need and have it ready for you. The more memory that's used, the merrier! The only problem develops with what is called a memory leak. That means that a program or process finishes using memory, and never returns it to the operating system as free when it is done. Then your available memory diminishes and diminishes until the system either locks or gets very slow due to lack of available memory.

If you want to see how well your machine is performing, try the performance monitor. Press your Windows key + x, and choose Computer Management. Poke around in the Performance section.

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Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

Let me echo that - Memory is meant to be used. It shouldn't be sitting around idle doing nothing if an app can use it. As long as your machine is working fine be happy that it's making such good use of its memory.

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Best regards,
Manny Carvalho
MS-MVP since 2002

I agree with what's been said, I was always told that memory is there to be used and if it's not it's wasted memory. My Notebook came with 4GB and I've added another 4GB and find it a little more speedy.

I'm sure if you persevere you will come to really like using Windows 8, I do, and I find that it is a lot quicker doing certain things.

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Joan Archer
http://crossstitcher.webs.com