vista ram confusion

So, I am using Vista and have 2GB of ram..
When I had Windows XP and 1GB of ram.. thats all I ever needed.. but nowadays I find myself closing programs to open up new ones..


why do I have to close programs.. what happened to paging..

explain this information to me..
I am gonna attach a picture of the Performance tab of the task manager.

First, we have the physical memory section at the bottom..
it says Total:2045, Cached:816, Free:77
This makes me assume that my programs are allocating 1.2GB of ram.. that seems fine.. So, why on earth can't I use that cached ram when I run out?
Shouldn't that be free'ed when it's needed?

Second, if you look at the Physical Memory Usage History graph.. you can't completely different information.
it shows a bit less than 300MB free in physical memory.

So wtf? what are these numbers. They don't match at all.


Now that I look at it.. maybe the physical memory graph actual talks about virtual memory.... but I am suppose to have a 1GB page file for it to use.. why doesn't it use it?
It must use it.. because 816MB is cached..
so then.. why on earth do I have to close programs?

I just don't get it.


Does someone else understand what's going on?

Is your system slowing down or are you just looking at perfmon?

This explains why Vista seems to be using almost all the ram all the time. No sense in reinventing the wheel.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

Quote:

---

Vista is trying its darndest to pre-emptively populate every byte of system memory with what it thinks I might need next

---

mm, I know the theory behind it

I am trying to stop out of memory errors..

The numbers don't make any sense to me

You're getting out of memory errors? Why didn't you say that in the first place? You need to look at your apps and see what is hogging your memory. It may also be your pagefile settings.

Vista uses the RAM in totally different way, than any previous Windows version, so don't look back at XP.

How many programs do you have starting that you do not need starting?