![]() Photograph: Jack Schofield/The GuardianĮvery Windows browser will run in 4GB, but the “lightest” common browser is Microsoft Edge. Process Explorer can show you how much memory your browser is using, here displaying Vivaldi. Once your laptop is up and running, a quick check with either utility will tell you if any programs are using more memory than they are worth. As a general indicator, the Peak Working Set number is probably as good as any. The Working Set Private number, which excludes shared code and swapfile space, tells you how much real RAM a program is using at the time. Double-clicking a program’s name tells you how it’s using memory, how much code is shared, and how much virtual memory (ie swapfile space) it’s using. Microsoft’s Process Explorer provides more details. Word 2010, with six documents open, is consuming 0.6%, and a small Excel spreadsheet 0.4%. The next highest score is Voidtools’ Everything, with 2.6%. ![]() On my PC, two browsers, Opera and Vivaldi, are now using more than 20% each, and nothing else matters. To make the column easier to understand, right-click in the header area, choose “Resource values” from the drop-down menu, then Menu and then Percents. The Memory column shows how much each program is using. To run it, press Ctrl-Alt-Del or right-click the taskbar and select Task Manager. The Task Manager provides a crude but useful guide. Should you include pages that are in RAM but not in use, that are in the swapfile, or use shared resources? Windows provides a lot of common code through dll library files, and if six programs are using the same megabytes of shared code, it’s counted six times instead of once. Sophisticated memory management techniques – including compression – make it hard to know how much memory any particular program is using. Windows 10’s Process Explorer can show you what is using your machine’s memory in more detail. Type resmon into Windows 10’s search box, run the Resource Monitor app, and click the Memory tab for a coloured representation of the RAM used for different purposes, including “hardware reserved”. It distinguishes between many types of memory, depending on whether pages are in use, can be swapped out when necessary, can be overwritten because they are no longer needed, or free. In reality, Windows 10’s memory management is more complicated than that. That’s one reason why fitting an SSD makes a laptop feel much more responsive: swapfile pages reload much faster. What happens when it runs out of space? It saves the pages of code it’s not using to the swapfile and reloads them into RAM only when they are needed. In my experience, Windows 10 can use anything from 1.2GB to about 3.5GB or more, depending on how much memory you have. Windows 10 makes such good use of memory, its swapfile (pagefile.sys, hidden on your hard drive) and other resources that it is best left to do its thing. When we were using Windows XP and Vista, geeks could improve on Windows’ use of memory. Task Manager can show you how much memory is being used at any one time. Nobody should be buying laptops with less than 128GB of SSD, or a bigger hard drive. Thankfully, that idea seems to have been abandoned. Its main purpose was to fit on tablets and cheap laptops with only 16GB or 32GB of storage. Probably neither of those is still important thanks to tumbling memory prices and the failure of Windows smartphones.Ī couple of years ago, Microsoft experimented with a version of Windows 10 called Windows Lean, but it didn’t use less memory. Another was to enable Windows to run on smartphones and tablets that only had 1GB or 2GB. One was to enable PC manufacturers to make cheaper laptops. Of course, Microsoft had ulterior motives. A laptop that could run Vista well in January 2007 can probably run Windows 10 well today. Microsoft has spent more than a decade making Windows more memory efficient. Windows 10 has been designed to run well on most computers, including low-power machines with limited memory, such as the Surface Go.
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