First off, I apologize if I am not doing this properly, but I always seem to have a problem of not knowing exactly where to post something, especially with so many pages to look through for a specific topic. That said...

I just bought an emachines T3642, AMD Athlon 4000+, single core and very good, Vista Home Premium. I have a question as to what it actually means when I open up my Task Manager and I read this at the bottom of the Task Manager Window.

Processes running are generally between upper 50's and lower 60's, CPU usage is generally between 2% and 7%, but the Physical memory is rarely if ever under low 60's%. What I'm asking is does that mean that I'm using 61% of my 1 gig of memory that came with this unit and if so, is that a high number. You know a lot of stuff comes preinstalled and I'm always worried about uninstalling anything that I didn't install myself for fear of doing damage to my computer.

Also, when I initially open the Task Manager, in the CPU Usage area, anywhere from 80 to 100% will flash for a moment, and then drop down to the single digits percentage. I am aware of a lot of processes running in background, but should I be concerned about the 80 to 100% that does flash for just that moment.

Whatever information you need I will be glad to provide. I'm not a computer expert. I just like to have a machine that runs as fast and as efficiently as it can, and I'd like to understand a little bit about the basics. I didn't seem to notice the high physical memory numbers when I had my last computer with XP Home, but I ruined that machine over a year ago and can't remember for sure.

Thanks for any help you can provide and sorry if this should be somewhere else.

My memory usage is about the same with not much running in the background. I've heard Vista gobbles up alot of memory which I guess is a good thing cause more stuff running in memory means it's not coming from the much slower hard drive.

Vista is much better with memory than XP. Vista also uses SuperFetch which pre-loads your most frequently used programs, including background programs, into memory to make them load faster. Should a program need the space, the program is unloaded and space is given.

Here's a link to a technical article on Windows memory improvements: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysin...als/memmgt.mspx
And here's an excellent discussion about the "quirks" in displaying memory statistics, even though it was published prior to Vista (works best in IE): http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/se...001491050E0E6C3

FWIW - I've got 8 gB of RAM on 64 bit Vista and it's running around 60% for me also.