Reducing Ram Usage?

Problem: On a cold boot, I've been noticing lately that, 50% of my memory/ram was being consumed. So, I searched to see if anybody was having the problem, but not quite. During the search, someone pointed out that setting prefetch & superfetch to cache only. So I did that. I also went to "msconfig" to try to prevent programs from self loading at boot. There wasnt really anything in there that was doing that. Which added more confusion for me.

Someone else mentioned that the (free program) cleanmem helped them in their case. I've also installed this too, rebooted and the same thing again, except instead of 50%, its down to 45% which I thought was still WAY TOO MUCH being consumed.

PC specs: 2.4ghz quadcore, 4gb ram (800mhz) 32bit OS

Solution: Well, I couldnt figure out for the life of me, what else could be hogging my memory. There were only maybe 15 process that runs on startup. Upon closer inspection, I decided to tick the "show all process from users", and I discovered thats where the problem is.

I had installed Java Runtime Enviorment, and it was using a whopping 550,000k of memory. But I havent had time to even run it, I just installed it a few days back and never bothered it. But after manually ending the process tree, it re-opened itself and hogged the 550,000k again.

Question. Since this app isnt on the list of "start-up" programs, what other way can I prevent this mem hog from hogging my mem?

I also have virtual memory/page filing disable. I've read something a while back saying that "if one has more than 2gb, its an advantage to disable this because page filing is actually slower than the ram itself" Therefore, using the ram (if its fast enough) will be much quicker to do what ever it suppose to do.

 

Ok, i think i fixed it. I went to COMPUTER MANAGEMENT, and set that JAVA stuff to "MANUAL". Rebooted, and at first, it was using the usual 40+%, but after a few seconds, it instantly went down to 20%. And even now, with CHROME open, its only using 25%. I can live with 25%.

I was going to delete this thread, but hopefully somebody else find it useful.

Ofcourse, Im always open for any other suggestions that could get me lower than 25% on start up tho,