Any OS is swiss cheese in the hands of some people. In the hands of trained professionals like you and I, it's fine.
It's loaded into superfetch, it's not actually using it. Plus, it's going to use more ram compared to XP which is about 9-10 years old now. Do you know how much higher the standards of memory has gone up since then? Also I don't know where you're getting 1gb of usage. You obviously have some kind of program running in the background, here's me on 2gb of ram. And I haven't even disabled any services yet on this machine either.
Thats because dcx_badass has 3 GB of ram and vbetts has 2gb of ram the more ram you have the more the OS is going to prefetch because it can take advantage of having more ram and as soon as a program needs it the OS just frees its self up for it.
Has been explained, more ram you have the more win7 will prefetch it, it tries make best use of available ram to speed things up. Unused ram net's you nothing. Doesn't matter if you idleing on 3GB...soon as a game or program is loaded the ram is freed up.
XP is invaluable to me. Not for use as a main OS in every day work, but as a dual boot OS to help troubleshoot or back-up/image/restore Win7 or Vista. Not that you need it often for such purposes, just that it adds some peace of mind in case your main OS is unbootable for whatever reason.
