BleepingComputer.com: Vista eating over 50% of my ram

Hello all I just have a quick problem,

I bought a new laptop for work (I'm a photographer) and it came with vista, I have 4 gigs of ddr3 ram and i have uninstalled all the extra programs that came with it but to my surprise vista is running at 51% of my ram just sitting there. I originally had thought that i had a trojan or some such thing as i had uploaded some things from my old hard drive, i ran avast superantispyware and hijackthis all that was found was a few tracking cookies and once those were gone im still running at 51%. my question is this is there anything i can do do make vista run with less ram? im more of an xp geek so vista is new waters for me...also when i looked at my processes i have around 6 or 7 instances of svchost running at any one time, that seems aweful strange to me... and my hijackthis log shows that i have a bunch of missing files from my system32 folder, im not an expert in this so it could mean nothing but i just thought id mention it. Thanks for your help!

try to optimize your computer to increase the system performance and get rid to unwanted junks file.
try this link and follow the steps which is given in this link.
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/moredone/optimize.mspx

Vista aggressively utilizes memory - your figure sounds about normal. As you continue to use your system, Windows will develop a profile of your application usage and optimize memory and hard drive to suit.

This short article explains it fairly well:

http://members.rushmore.com/~jsky/id37.html

well thats good to know! thanks for your help! is there any solution to vista running 14 copies of svchost at one time? or what to do with "missing files" in a hijack this log? those are the only 2 things i'm concerned about now.

Try opening MSCONFIG and removing startup items as well as non Microsoft services that you don't need. New PCs come loaded with junk from the manufacturer!

Click start
Type msconfig in the "Start Search" box
Click on the startup tab and remove unwanted items
Click on Services and put a check next to hide all Microsoft services ... Then remove services you don't need

You can also use regedit to remove start items
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Run
HLMU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Run

Reboot your system after making these changes and enjoy your freedom!
This should clear up your problems ... let us know how it goes.

Be very careful running MSCONFIG, you can cause more problems if you use it incorrectly. Vista uses memory differently than XP so RAM usage of 50% may sound excessive, but it is not.

with 4gb of ram and your pc being idle, 50% is a lot for vista, i'm running a sql server instance and the basic apps i need for my laptop and it runs on 41% on idle, and i only have 2gb of ram. if it is on 50% and you're not running stuff then that's when you should worry.

I'm using 8GB and Vista uses about 30%, on my 4GB PC it is 40%, so 50% is not unusual. Remember, Vista loads applications into memory after launch with Superfetch to improve speed. The amount of memory dedicated to this is not static and differs based on available RAM and usage. I'm using Windows 7 right now, which also has something like Superfetch, and I'm using 20% with Firefox and Live Mail open.