How-To Geek

And this is my current Vista with IE running. But when I called Opera, because this is my Photobucket browser, it shot up to over 800MBs. As I said earlier, it depends what you are running and what is being loaded in which sequence. The more you pile on, the more RAM is being used - in anticipation that you might use it again in the near future. Quite a clever system.

I think what you see is the difference between 32bit and 64bit. Else our systems are equal - same processor and same 4GB RAM. You also see that in the page file sizes. Interesting!

Not certain because there are a lot of other factors - e.g. the startups and their footprint. From the above data we cannot really make an apples to apples comparison - just an approximation. But my guess would be that x64 uses RAM more generously (which is good). That's what probably accounts for the slight performance advantage of x64 on 4GB systems.

PS: I just made a little experiment. I started a few "heavy hitters" like Ghost, Gimp, etc. And now I am around 900MBs although I closed all those programs. So it also depends of what you ran earlier - not only what is running right now. And if you only shut down with sleep mode (and not total shutdown), you keep this historic footprint and build on top of that.