[blakeyrat]

I desperately hope you know how the Windows memory manager works before you say it "uses half your RAM". Windows is very aggressive about caching and (especially) precaching-- if you're not using a memory readout tool that's been updated since Windows Vista changed things around, it's probably misleading you into thinking Windows' precache is actual "in-use" memory. It's not.

(If you're looking at Microsoft's Task Manager, make sure you're seeing the amount of memory in "available", that's what counts. "Free" is kind of a useless measure in Vista+.)