Windows Vista is a memory eater

[michaeldadmum]

I am running Windows Vista (6.0.6000) x64 on a PC with 3GB RAM. When I boot up, it eats me 900 MB RAM. The only resident programs are nod32 and sidebar

[iman]

 it's suppose to be so. There a whole lot of processes and threads running on the background that will eat-up your the  Memory of your PC. I hope that helps Because we are on Computerhope.

[Calum]

To confirm what has been said above, your thread title is correct, Vista sits in your computer like a gremlin munching on your RAM sticks.
Well, close enough . . . it does use up a lot of RAM for reasons that aren't apparent.
I am told that this is because it uses "aggressive caching", loading parts of programs into RAM before they are executed to speed up loading these programs.
So, this is normal for Vista.

[Anodoin]

Considering that the requirements for everything above Vista Basic lists 1 gig of ram, is this surprising?

[Broni]

I don't know, why some people seems to be kind of allergic to Vista. Maybe because it's new, so it's a good time for bashing. I can even see some people, who even never used Vista, but they already know.
It's normal, that new OSes use, and will use more, and more resources. Better get used to it, or you can always go back to Win 3.1.
I have 2gig of RAM (+ 6gig of VM ). Right now, I have about 15 background applications running, plus Firefox, and Thunderbird open.
Total RAM used at this moment is 1.1GB (+ barely any VM part).
I see nothing wrong with it. Everything works perfectly fine.