[jabroni_salad]

Back when I played WoW I would occasionally run into issues with windows trying to put the game into memory compression, as opposed to basically any other process. It turned the game into a powerpoint.

You could either get freaky with process explorer, or just keep some overhead so the system wouldn't try to do that. When I asked my guildies, they told me the 'default' for gaming is 16GB now, I was on 8 at the time.

Pretty much every gamer will at some point tab out to process manager to see wtf the computer is trying to do and exactly zero of them will think to themselves "I'm so glad there is no wasted memory!"

[spookie]

For the 3rd paragraph, specifically: That's a fault with Windows not being clear enough with what is actually being in use, and what may be used and already there for a myriad of reasons.

(edit: specified my intent on the reply)