Me (and many others). This is a total waste of RAM.
And it's not my opinion, it is a fact.
I do not.
And that's a not intelligent way of thinking. If you have 1TB of memory and the OS alone takes 900GB just keep it idle, then what's the point of having so much memory.
Nothing against it, but if you support and use this you are stupid just like them are. No decent OS need so much, that's a waste of memory.
I'm not talking about caching... I'm talking memory hungry OSes that eats hundreds of megabytes just "keep it alive" and leave that amount impossible to use.
RAM should be used wisely. If you use it wisely, you won't need that much.
And if you need that much, you will be able to use more in real world applications instead of losing them to OS. This is making your money spent on RAM worth every cent!
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Not to mention those big OSes that eat precious GB of your hard disk just for nothing useful. But this is not being debated here...
You should really look into how Windows manages memory more. Notice I said on my machine(a laptop) it only uses 0.9GB. Windows targets RAM usage at about 25% of the total memory installed in the compute, of course it can only go so far. It is extremely efficient with managing memory. If you have 4GB of RAM, like my laptop, it will use about 1GB when idle. If you have 8GB it will use about 2GB. It doesn't really go above 2GB though, so adding 16GB of RAM will still result in about 2GB of RAM used idle.
It manages to do this by paging the less important processes related to the less important services. These are the services that some people spend hours going through and disabling to save memory. But it isn't really necessary, because Microsoft has already optimized this and will page these services if it needs to.
However, like I said there is a limit. If you have 2GB of memory it will use about 0.75GB.
But in the end, it doesn't matter how much memory it is using, what matters if the machine runs smoothly. And even with 2GB of RAM, Win8.1 runs extremely smoothly and works perfectly for everything but playing games. My HTPC has 2GB of RAM, and works perfectly for watching movies, browsing the web, Office apps, I even run Photoshop on it.
It isn't wasting RAM, it is using it efficiently and adapting to the situation it is in. An OS sitting there using very little RAM doesn't mean it is not wasting RAM, and an OS using the RAM it has available is not an OS that is wasting RAM. The RAM is there to be used, and Win8.1 knows that.
So I'll rephase my statement slightly to clearify. Who cares Win8.1 idles using 2GB of memory when you've got 8GB?
Edit: I'm not trying to keep the argument going, I just trying to get the information on how Windows manages memory out there, because there are a lot of people that don't know.