Solved Question re: RAM usage level

Hello People -

Situation: HP Pavilion Elite quad duo 64-bit with 8 GB RAM and two 512 GB hard drives. Running Vista Home Premium 64-bit.

Question: I often have a number of windows and programs open, such as 6 or 7 tabs in Firefox, maybe 2 windows with Maple13 (a symbolic math program), perhaps a PDF document or Word document or two.

As info, the machine came with 6 GB RAM and I added the other 2 GB.

Why does my RAM usage always seem to hover about 1.6 GB to 2.1 GB and not go anywhere near the 8 GB installed?

I thought this RAM would be useful, but it does not seem to be.

What can I do to increase RAM usage levels?

I do know that when I do a hardware test on the RAM that the test will kick usage levels up over 90% of installed memory. So the memory can actually be engaged.

Thanks for your discussion and responses.

you cant increase ram usage mate why would you want too? 8gb of ram is way way more that you'll ever need , you would need to be doing some heavy CAD type stuff to even come close to using that much ram , or run three or 4 games at the same time

give it a few years and their might be some apps and games that will utilise it

its always handy for multitasking but you could run a game run a cad program and do some serious photo editing with all that and still have ram left to run firefox 200 times over

Hi Archie -

Thanks for the education! I am glad to know that it is there, even if it is more than a bit redundant, like so many other things these days.

Your comment went directly to the core of the issue. Thanks.

Take care and all the best!

no problem mate , i forgot to mention video editing that can consume HUGE ammounts of ram