What are some Windows services/applications/default startups I can disable to lower idle RAM usage?
Right now on a new(ish) installation of Windows 10 Pro it's at around 3GB (out of 16), I'd like it to be 2GB, ideally 1.5 or otherwise as low as possible. No non-essential third party apps are running in the background.
I heard disabling the Superfetch service can lower RAM usage by a large amount... but other than that...
RAM is made to be used, why bother to reduce the usage unless it's causing a problem. We have seen this request since the days of Vista, a modern OS is designed to use any available RAM efficiently and so will always appear to be using more RAM than older obsolete systems.
What is the blooming point of doing this?
You have plenty of RAM. Windows 10 uses more RAM to do its memory compression to minimise paging etc.
Unless you are using hugely memory intensive programs, I doubt you will get close to using 16 GB of RAM and if that close, 1 or 2 GB used will make no impact, and you should add extra RAM any way.
My 8GB laptop sits all day at 2.5GB and barely blinks an eye.
You are more likely to cause issues by trying to limit RAM usage.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM.
Here's my memory usage:
this is without tinkering anything. So as you can see Windows is pretty good at memory management. I would not go round messing with services if not your sure what they do as you could break things. Some services give multiple functions to Windows.
You can use CleanMem Free - set its task to run every 5 mins to get as much free RAM as possible.
Just noticed some interesting differences between what I presume is 10586 and Insider 14393.
Note addition of "(compressed)".
The other thing is it shows the speed as 800 MHz like CPU-Z does ie you have to double it as DDR. I was worried at first but CPU-Z shows it as 800 MHz as well.
@cerebus Interesting. I've not seen that before. But showing 800mhz is correct if you bought 2 sticks and have them in dual channel mode. Also I disabled paging file because I have 16Gb of ram and I wonder if it shows compressed when thats enabled.
Removing the Paging file has been known to cause issues with some software that is written in such a way as to expect the Paging file to be present.
It is sometimes better to have at least a token paging file (say 256Mb), to ensure that all programs ran at optimum
That was indeed the case a few years ago when programs like Adobe would require the pagefile. I personally have never had an issue with disabling it but other people will need to think carefully and look at how much ram they have and the speed of their computer overall. I would say if you have less than 8Gb, don't disable it.
If I do come across such programs that require it, I can always enable a small size as you suggested.
Memory management in any modern operating system is highly dynamic. When available memory is plentiful (which is certainly the case here) the memory manager will allow processes to use pretty much whatever memory they want. That is the way it should be. This is the best possible of all situations regarding memory as it allows everything to operate with maximum efficiency. Interfering with this is a crime against performance. But if a memory hungry program is run this idle memory usage will be trimmed back as necessary to meet the demand. Of course with 16 GB RAM this probably won't even be necessary. And that too is good.
Trying to reduce memory usage in this situation will impair performance and and possibly impact functionality.
Please do not run CleanMem or anything like it. The only benefit they provide is to make the numbers appear better in Task Manager to people who do not understand what they mean.
Quote
