Hi josh. There is actually not really such a thing as free memory. Any memory that is left after loading the OS and apps, will be used for the background processes. So the less that is showing, the better. Vista does an excellent job of arranging it.

What does Hibernation file cleaned and disabled mean in Josh1's topic mean?

josh1, hello. I'm running with only 12 MB "free" out of 2 GB:

This is typical and I have seen the Free number go down to 2 MB. Notice that the Physical Memory usage is 47%, which is typical on my system. As pointed out by LH and whs, these numbers are not very meaningful. What number would be good? Or bad? I don't know.

@AST, using the disk cleanup tool, you can delete the hibernation file, hiberfil.sys, which also disables hibernation. This frees up hard drive space but not system memory. If you have more questions about this, please start a new topic.

Possibly unrelated, but you may want to try ReadyBoost to boost your memory?
(explained in more detail here)
Basically, if you have a large flash disk lying around wasting space (anything from the regular memory stick to camera cards and external drives even!)
Plug it in and set to ready boost, and use all the space you can/want to

If your computer has a lack of RAM, this should help, and even if you have 2-4gb, it will still help, even if you don't notice too much difference

Thanks whs for the tip - edited my post accordingly

Bribery will get you nowhere.

Not at all. Don't worry.

The FREE MEMORY is just what has not been used before. Capture from my 8GB system :

See the RED circled areas and the highlighted text.

Although TM shows conflicting results, 2GB used in the graph but Physical says much less free, the HELP indicated it includes memory recently used. Since this is a 'swapping' system, the memory loads up sequentially as you load programs. It will mark no longer used memory as discardable, but it keeps track of it in case you need it again. Once you totally exhaust free memory, that discardable memory will be used and depending on how much memory is released and used by another process, your 'free' memory count will change. For 'speed', recently used memory is released last in case you'd need it again. Let us say you had IE running and closed it. All segments it used before would be cached, not discarded. Run another program, out of free memory, if IE was the only thing you ran, it would start discarding those segments of memory. Didn't run anything after closing IE, and started it again, no need to re-load memory, from the 'cache' it would enable those loaded segments.

The Widget on the right agrees with TM's graph on the FREE memory I have FWIW.

Irv S.

This question is hard to answer. There is no indication at which point each performance sot was taken and what was running at the time. The only obvious fact is that your RAM and Page File are a lot smaller than on the previous shot/system. Therefore is is likely that your system does not have the performance level of the previous system. But the CPU load is, as I said, a function of what is running at this moment and, of course, the muscle of the CPU.

Thanks for all posts my understanding of this topic is much clearer :)

Have been watching Taskmanager after using a Ram Optimizer....

I think they might be a gimmick more than anything else !