vista ram consumption is dependend on how much ram you have got. if you have got plenty of ram, it gets used as some kind of cache i think.
i don't use vista since it simply doesn't offer me any advantage over xp. i don't need all the bloat like the wasteful user interface.
And because some of my programming tools raised problems on Vista I just installed Virtual Box to install XP in a virtual environment. And XP is able to boot in this virtual PC in 5 seconds, really, no exaggeration. This is amazing.
Since I have 2 monitors I can run XP on one and Vista on the other one and can work parallel in both systems with only one PC. This is great and I have maximum compatibility.
i also use several operating systems in virtual box. i like this kind of virtualization much more than having to reboot into a different os and it can be very useful for experimenting with various stuff without trashing your main os!
