decyphering task manager window

[Wingo]

I am trying my best to make sense of these memory numbers in the task manager. I'm running x64 if it makes a difference.

1. I have completely removed all the page files in my system including deleting the pagefile.sys files myself. Why is it still showing a page file?

1b. Why is so much of it being used?

2. I have superfetch and prefetch set to only cache boot files, so why is so much of my cache being used after boot and why does it steadily grow for about 10 minutes after boot?

2b. I'm considering turning of pre and superfetching, what are your thoughts on this?

3. Why the hell is so much Physical Memory being used? I have minimal processes and services running and can only account for about 500-600mb from those. My vista installation on my laptop with a similar setup only uses about 500mb on 1gb of RAM.

Thanks in advanced

[ShaneG_old]

Does X64 use more processes?  I have X32 and can get it down to 30 processes running, and I've read here that it can go down into the 20's if you know what to disable.

50 seems like a very high number. :-/

[Wingo]

I share a printer and files over a network and I like the aero theme, so I need to keep a lot of the services to support those on. If it wasn't for that it would be in the thirties.
Also during that screenshot I had resource monitor, firefox and a few other things I had opened. I usually boot with around 45. But as I said, my laptop runs with the same programs and services and it can run on about 500mb of RAM, leaving 500mb free.
This isn't causing any performace problems, I have another 5 gig free, I just mainly wont to find out why there are these weird numbers.

[Wingo]

I spent the past several hours severely trimming my services and researching for answers.

I found that the area that says "Page File" is actually the total of physical and page file sizes combined, so with no page file it will be your ram size.

I've cut about 400mb of RAM usage using the service cuts, but it is still running a lot higher than I have found normal for my laptop. One thought that occured to me is due to the large amount of Ram on my system, is it leaving more information in the Ram rather than swapping it out? How much of that 1 gig of usage is ACTUALLY in use and how much is just sitting around waiting to be over-written with new stuff? When I looked in the resource monitor this seems to be the case, there was no entries of the page file being wrote to or read from where as on my laptop it is always up the top of both lists.