I don't get this need to see how much free/idle ram you have....
Its there to be used, if you buy 8GB of ram, you want windows do USE it not leave 6GB of it free
Agreed; Windows these days has features that pre-load things into RAM so that when you need them, they're already there. Now, if another program comes along and needs that RAM, Windows will dump the pre-loaded data making room for the new program.
So while Windows might be using 4GB on boot...well, that 4GB might be preloading something like Visual Studio, Chrome, Outlook and so forth. As long as you're not causing a ton of page faults, idle usage is silly to look at.
Didn't the 420-series chipsets support a whopping 128MB? That could have been fun back in the day...
That's really not an issue for consumer type workloads. F.x. my 128GB Samsung 830 currently has ~4000 hours on it, ~3.5TB written. Which when you do the math works out too... hold your breath for it... ~27 P/E cycles. I think the 27nm Samsung NAND is rated for 3-5000 P/E cycles.
It gets hammered with everything you can think of. (minimal, 1GB) Swap file, hibernation, temporary file transfers etc. No mercy.
I guess I'm not a consumer workload - my SSDs have more writes on them. Either way, I don't see a reason to have a swap file when I have so much RAM, I never really go past 70-80% used (and that's with a ton of stuff open, and a game.)
I wanted to do more than 64MB in that 486, but I was a kid at the time, and coming from a 286 with something like 8MB of RAM and a 20MB hard disk...well, 64 was impressive!