Why must Vista use all of my RAM?!?

It’s really annoying Vista, the way you hog all of my RAM. I’m not doing anything particularly taxing at the moment – the largest application I have open is MS Excel, so why are you using over 70% of my RAM?!?

I wish I could talk to software, and just ask it a question like above. I can’t figure it out. I’ve tweaked like there is no tomorrow, and Vista is just a hog – plain and simple.

This isn’t due to SuperFetch either, as I have that disabled (along with 15 or so other services).

My running applications?

• RoyalTS
• 3 cmd.exe windows
• Citrix XenCenter
• Password Corral
• Outlook
• Google Chrome (4 Windows, with perhaps 15 tabs total)
• Pidgin
• Notepad2
• Excel
• TweetDeck

And here is the result:

It makes me sad. I really wish I could understand why Vista does this, when I could run a similar load on XP, 7, any Linux distro or my Mac running Leopard and not see anywhere near the memory usage, or the sluggishness of Vista. That being said, contrary to what others may say, Vista is rock solid stable for me – it might get sluggish and it might want more RAM than it needs, but at least it isn’t crash-happy.

I feel better now that I took this brief moment to vent – now back to your regularly scheduled program