silly question about windows memory

Helmut said:

"I didn't know software used storage locations. "

Virtually every application will use storage space on your HDD/SSD.
In most cases that will be temporary e.g. When you print something a temporary printing file is made, or using Word will make temporary files.

All Web Browsers use very large amounts of caches which is increased by having a large number of Tabs open, easily many GB of data.

All together this can easily approach the 10 GB or 100 GB you are seeing.

That is why it is recommended at least 20% of your HDD/SSD should always be free space. That means always buying an HDD/SSD much larger than you think you need.

If you think you need X+20%, then sure as eggs are eggs, you probably need at least 2xX. No matter how much yiu have, you always run out soooner or later (in part because people are less dusciplined with lots of memory. Memory demand is an ever increasing number. I remember my first harddrive, size of a small suitcase, and it had a magifucent 20 MB (yep megabyte) of storage - lol.

ironfist said:

I had about 100 firefox tabs open.

Enable sleep tabs in FF or try something like Reduce Memory

By default, Firefox will use disk storage for the cache and its size can balloon. You could use memory only for the cache, with high speed internet connection. With slow internet connection, memory caching might not be a good idea.

To check the size of the memory used, type "about:cache" in the address bar; with ten tabs open, it would show:



Watching YouTube and other multimedia can easily triple the "Storage in use" size. In which case, just increase the "Maximum storage size". The disk listing is somewhat misleading, Firefox will keep some of the files on disk:



The disk's internet cache size is pretty much constant, might be the minimum size required.

There are some benefits for caching in memory, like less writing to the physical drive, faster writing to memory and cache is cleared once the browser closed.