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To make a long story short, I just upgraded my PC with an i7 920 processor and an ASUS P6T motherboard. Things worked out so that moving from 6gb of RAM to 12gb was nearly free - So I did it! Now I have Vista 64-bit with 12gb of ram, tuned up nicely.

Aside from just using the PC in a manner which would do so normally, is there any way, settings, et cetera, to coax Vista or applications to use RAM more liberally? I'm familiar with Vista SuperFetch, so maybe there are some settings here to make things happen better, or will Vista just use as much as it can normally?

Thanks!

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    Im not sure there is anything you can do really, Vista is supposed to do this automagically. I guess you have to load a lot of heavy applications and see if I'm correct.
    – Ivo Flipse
    Jul 30, 2009 at 8:16
  • +1 for someone finally asking the right question! You want your system to use as much RAM as possible. Jan 1, 2012 at 9:04

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I would like to suggest 2 links to read about this issues

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

http://www.vistax64.com/general-discussion/239309-how-do-i-get-vista-64-use-all-my-ram.html

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It's really hard for even Vista to use more than 6GB of RAM. What you can do is use a Ramdrive program to create a virtual hard drive (ie R:) and put cache in there like firefox/photoshop/swapfile. You can also install your most launched programs there for a slight speed boost. Just don't put anything super important. I myself use ramdisk plus as it can use the memory above the 3.2 addressable in XP. I just put together an i7 and mapping out how to use 12GB. I generally run lots of VM for testing so it shouldn't be too hard ;)

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With quite rare exceptions Windows is already making near optimum use of memory. It is just that Task Manager doesn't reveal this, and in many cases it obscures it. If Task Manager seems to show poor use of memory you are probably misinterpreting it.

A ramdisk is almost always a poor use of memory. You will be better off letting Windows manage it as it wills.

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If you really want to use up a lot of RAM just set up several virtual machines using VirtualBox or a similar program. You basically set up a separate virtual computer with its own operating system. When you create the VM you can allocate a specific amount of memory for it to use.

The end result is that (with your amount of RAM) you could easily have a Windows Vista and two Linux distros running simultaneously. Or, if you're feeling froggy, you could be running Windows AND Linux AND OS X at the same time. Look out.

My only other advice would be to watch a high-def movie file while playing Crysis, editing a huge project in photoshop, and running Chrome with 128 tabs open.

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