If my RAM isn't being used, it's being wasted. Better to have Windows caching stuff ahead of time than load data from the slow disk after my drive has spun down.

And really, who cares if it's being used? If it ever becomes a problem, you need to buy some more; there is no excuse anymore. RAM is cheap and plentiful, even with these "rising prices." Even my netbook has 2GB of RAM.

Steve said "I thought Windows 7 was supposed to me much nicer and less of a memory muncher than Vista"

I found Vista to take around 1200MB while Windows 7 used 800MB. Eitherway when you are caching things it shock horror uses ram!

"Okay, I guess Win7 isn't a thrifty as XP then?"

Based on nothing more than my own observations...

It's not as thrifty as XP no, however it's not unreasonable in it's memory use as far as I'm concerned. The initial bootum usage is higher, but I'd say it scales fairly similarly to XP running similar apps.

In daily usage I've struggled to hit 3G memory use, whereas I'd peak around 1.5-2G in XP doing similar stuff. (Not games.) This is 64bit Win 7 VS 32bit XP.

I've not used Vista enough to compare that I'm afraid. (It's amazing how bloody awful Vista is compared to W7, despite them being .1 apart in versions.)

FWIW having just checked, in July 2004 I paid the princely sum of 105 pounds (and 2 pence!) for 2 512MB sticks of RAM; earlier this year I paid 32quid for 2 2G sticks. That's over 8 times the storage for a similar price; W7 is nowhere near 8 times as greedy as XP.

I think the point was that people will be buying new computers, not people will be buying new ram for their computers. And from what I've seen, win7 does use less ram than vista. Of course xp uses less, but win98 uses even less than that, and dos... well that uses almost none.

I thought Windows 7 was supposed to me much nicer and less of a memory muncher than Vista... And of course everyone bought Vista and must be upgrading from that...

Ohhh...

Okay, I guess Win7 isn't a thrifty as XP then?

And then when the Christmas sales fall flat, you'll see a glut and then the news headlines will read, "The bottom falls out of the DRAM market"