[Retribution]

How do I clear cached physical memory? My task manager currently says I have 370 mb free, which doesn't seem that much since I have 3 gigabytes of total physical memory.

[Vagrant0]

Retribution, on Nov 12 2009, 03:17 AM, said:

How do I clear cached physical memory? My task manager currently says I have 370 mb free, which doesn't seem that much since I have 3 gigabytes of total physical memory.

I'm not sure, but I believe that is referring to your RAM. At any rate, it's cleared up by not having as many background processes running. Vista alone requires between 500 and 700mb for normal operation. Depending on what antivirus and security programs you have, it can require more than 1gb for normal operation... which is why many people upgrading to vista when it came out were experiencing huge stability problems. Videocard software, like ATI catalyst can also be rather RAM heavy for normal operation. Naturally, anything which requires temporary storage of data, such as moving files, un/packing files, viewing documents, viewing images, recording data, receiving data from an outside source (streaming, torrenting, downloading, uploading, spyware) can also cause RAM usage to spike.

It will free up as these processes finish*. Before jumping to conclusions, it would probably help to know under what conditions this was observed.

*if it doesn't clear up, you might want to try resetting, or letting the computer idle and do nothing for awhile. At any rate, usually, once full, your system will attempt to purge any obsolete data.