Well I had a wild hair thinking that I could recover some RAM usage by upgrading from my current Windows Vista Ultimate to the Windows 7 RC1 (Build 7100). Why not I figured if it blows up then I will just whack it all and re-install Vista anyhow.

My machine is a Q6600 (Quad 2.4 Ghz) with 6GB of RAM. With just Vista at a cold boot it consumes 2.2GB of RAM!;

I thought for sure that upgrading to the latest Windows 7 RC1 would lower the memory usage. But after the upgrade (which took about 2 hours, blah) I still have 1.25GB of RAM being used by just the OS.

One really has to wonder what the hell Windows is doing with all that friggin’ RAM. I mean seriously over a gigabyte of RAM? I dual-boot into Ubuntu 9.0.4 and its using 250MB of RAM to the desktop. Really makes you wonder.