chatting with dell support......

[Chewy]

Depending upon your video memory in reserved addressing space, windows 32 bit only sees 3.2 gigs?
Are you running 64 bit?

[atifsh]

my system came with ultimate 64bit, but iv installed home premium 32 cause of driver issues with few hardware. but since then all have been updated for 64bit. except my tv tuner that i hardly use now

[Chewy]

All the tests I have seen only show people barely using 4 gigs with Vista, noone has shown where the extra 4 gigs ever gets used

You would need some heavy duty enterprise I/O like a web server to need that much ram. I would think a couple of raid stripes also. Gaming is the only application that starts to use a couple of gigs.

[atifsh]

u made a good point here, i hardly play games now... my system idels at 32 - 36 % of memory usage at 3 gb. never seen it go above 60 %.

here is an example, my system currently on 2 gigs ram and almost everything i have opened....

[Chewy]

with that much multitasking the quad core would help more than a lot of ram, of course how many things can you do at once with a computer, spybot is a scanner and shouldn't be resident

[atifsh]

well i got that idea when i had a dell precision 390 for a day, and i loved it, so responsive, but that had 2.66 xeon dualcore, 8 gigs of buffered ram and just plain vista64 nothing more.

guess 3 gb is enough, but cause i had to buy ram ill just make it 4 gig, use 32bit vista yes it will be round 3 gig ram only, and upgrade my processor unless pixelview make 64bit drivers for my tvtuner ill stay with 32bit. or the next update will be new tv tuner

[atifsh]

with that much multitasking the quad core would help more than a lot of ram, of course how many things can you do at once with a computer, spybot is a scanner and shouldn't be resident

i know i cant use many of those on same time i just did that so we can see even at 2 gb ram and so many programs it is'nt using all ram, maxed out at 88%. and that E4300 1.8 c2d doing well yeah.

[copyless]

With Vista 64bit, quad core, and 8GB ram, I barely ever see over 20% of my ram being used, so I would guess at this time the extra 4GB I have is basically a total waste. I think about 24% was about as high as I ever reached and that was trying.

[atifsh]

ok here is a thought, havnt searched google yet....

if one has more then 4 gb or 8 gb as in ur case, making virtual memory small really small like less then 1 gb or less, wouldnt that make vista to use physical memory and thus making things faster?