excessive ram usage

[Mister.T]

I've been trying a few fresh installs on my father's computer. His previous install was 17.3 Cinnamon, which ticked over nicely at around 350 mb of ram.
Mint 19 (set up with the the same startup applications running) uses considerably more and is a bit of a pain for his 1.7 gb of ram available. Xfce uses over 400 mb, which would be fine if it didn't have a few issues on his machine. Mate uses 560+ mb and Cinnamon 19 now uses a whopping 650+ mb of the available ram just ticking over.

Why such an increase in resources used in Mint 19?

[Pjotr]

Disable all visual effects in Cinnamon:
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinux ... n-Cinnamon
(item 5.1, right column)

And while you're at it, also apply some other speed tweaks mentioned on that page.

[all41]

I've been trying a few fresh installs on my father's computer. His previous install was 17.3 Cinnamon, which ticked over nicely at around 350 mb of ram.
Mint 19 (set up with the the same startup applications running) uses considerably more and is a bit of a pain for his 1.7 gb of ram available. Xfce uses over 400 mb, which would be fine if it didn't have a few issues on his machine. Mate uses 560+ mb and Cinnamon 19 now uses a whopping 650+ mb of the available ram just ticking over.

Why such an increase in resources used in Mint 19?

Pretty much as expected re ram usage/Mint desktops.
Personally I would explore correcting the issues with Xfce--and gift your Dad this Christmas with an up to date machine.
just saying

[smurphos]

Why such an increase in resources used in Mint 19?

Out of interest have you moved from 32bit install to a 64bit - the latter uses significantly more RAM across the board with the same desktop and hardware.