Why is ram running so high?

Hi Gents, and Ladies

Excuse the fundamental question but I have just upgraded to Vista Home Premium, 32 bit after many years of using previous os.

I've got a brand new computer, 4 gig of ram, 2.83 Quad Core, nvidia 9400 graphics.

I've only installed Adobe, Google Earth, basic stuff, and, against my better judgement, a trial of Norton antivirus just to see what it was doing these days.

Anyway, 4 gig of ram, and it's constantly running at 42%! That's nearly 2 gigs worth.

Is this ok? Been doing a bit of research and it seems Vista frees up ram when it's needed but it seems a bit excessive

I also see there are tweaks such as turning off defender (by the way if there is a decent tweak site I would appreciate being pointed in the right direction as the ones I'm looking at don't seem that great and are pretty old).

So is 42% ok? I haven't even got this thing out of the stalls yet!

Cheers

Take a look at your task manager, click on processes tab, and sort by mem usage. You will be able to find any memory hogs.

My 4GB RAM quad core runs at 38% right now (Vista Home Premium). All I do is look at this forum with IE8. So your 42% seem to be in the norm. You might want to have a look at the startup programs (msconfig). Maybe you can stop a few useless startups (which I have already done). But it does not really matter because 4GBs will go a long way.

Hello dunno,
Take a look here for a few tweaks, there are other tutorials that may help too in the tutorial section.
Checking on startup programs is a good idea, as whs said in the previous post.
Good luck and post your results.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/81176-speed-up-performance-vista.html