It is at some level wordplay. But it is very serious. You do want some head room as you suspect so yes extremely high RAM usage can become a problem. With 50% to 70% I just was not seeing that as the primary problem most certainly with a 708KB file when his free RAM is from just under 1GB up to almost 1.5GB?
M$ recommends 1GB RAM for Vista (512MB for HB) he almost always has the entire recommended or more completely free. But M$ assumes you did not play with the pagefile. One reason I asked. Disabling can cause various erratic issues. I see Vista with his amount of RAM hovering close to 50%, yea he is a little above but still within the norm.
As such and with his stated issue I do not connect the two. Many people want their RAM usage as low as possible that makes no sense unless certain conditions. Yes if you know you have much useless stuff running either as applications or services yea remove them as much for the CPU polling as wasting RAM.
Nori had a good
link earlier that I think you might want to read.
"Unused RAM is wasted" is a little tongue and cheek. But it holds a very real truth when understood in context. It is not 100% literal. Someone who has 4GB of RAM and sees only 50% is normally used is a fool to try and sell 2GB. But so is someone who wants to lower RAM usage without reason.
I wish we could resolve OP's original question but I just don't think RAM is the issue. Unless as I said pagfile is disabled. I do not think that would explain but willing to at least investigate.
Since pagefile has been mentioned (yea I know only me

) I want to say I used to disable and/or set the size. That was 98SE it did make some sense then. But things were very different. We had 192MB/256MB RAM and 12GB HDD's. Since XP disabling or controlling swapfile size is of no value. The reasons people will tell it is beneficial is factually flawed.
Let me start with disabling. The argument is RAM is faster and we have so much so why not force RAM to be more used? Good theory, problem is when Windows goes to put things in page file and not there it dumps. So as slow as storage drives are if Windows wants it will not be in the most efficient place Windows would look. But it actually crashes the program does not even look in storage in many instances. So you get no benefit.
On fixed size. The theory is with a fixed size it does not fragment so it is faster. It is not spread all over the HDD. 2nd aspect of this is saves space. On the 2nd with the size of drives even going back a few years I hardly think a GB here or there matters. You have plenty of space. If you need a GB's for some mp3's you my friends need a new HDD. On the first, Windows creates a fixed contiguous pagefile so it does not fragment. It will if needed in crease the size if needed. And yes this will not necessarily be contiguous with the primary. But much as with the disabling no pagefile no save. So if not an option it will unload data. resulting in a less efficient retrieval or crash.
All that said, yes I could likely disable my pagefile and other than some legacy applications the require it I might be fine. But in no way would I benifit in anyway. I am not that hardup for storage. I do think my system might get little benefit but that is not the same as benefit as I have 8GB.
People who have SSD's and are concerned about finite write might want to consider. I wouldn't because if I got a billion dollars I find it hard to believe I would worry about running out of money anymore. SSD's have plenty of writes.
