I am boosting my Gateway 507GR up to 2GB (reputedly its max, though some say it’ll take four) because it takes 2 minutes to load Firefox(!) and at least 40 seconds for the Control Panel folder to open and populate with icons! It’s a new installation on a 7200 rpm SATA drive.
You need to visit the add/remove programs dialog and remove all the bloatware most PCs come with. Particularly anti-virus, which will literally cripple your performance…
Thanks for this post Jeff! I was totally outraged when I saw that out of my 8GB RAM 2GB was used as system cache and 1GB was loaded for other tasks. I had the idea that more free RAM was a better thing but after reading your explanation I feel much better about getting Vista now.
I totally love it in Vista that it doesn’t come sluggish at all when I have tons of heavy stuff running like Flash CS3, Photoshop, Outlook, Excel and other office apps, P2P, etc. Works much smoother than XP in any desktop situation I’ve encountered so far… but then again, I don’t play much games.
XP just freezes for countless seconds when eg. trying to open a new file browser in a situation like above. And I “only” have have 2GB ram, which is cheap these days so even 4GB would not make a noticable hole in the wallet.
I like how Mac OS X does this — if I’m correct, it caches applications in memory when you’ve opened them since the computer booted up. This works great because things launch faster, and if it eventually runs low on memory all it takes is a reboot. I would get really pissed off if there was a background task running all the time whose sole purpose was to fill up my memory.
Well, there is one more thing to note. Whatever super fetch is doing, it cannot just discard pages when you need free RAM. It has to zero all pages before giving you that memory. Quote from: http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/archive/2007/10/10/the-memory-shell-game.aspx) "Due to C2 security requirements, all pages must be scrubbed before handed to a new process."
So, to put it simple:
Vista is more hdd activity, more threads and longer internal data structures, additional overhead of page zeroing, and probably more…
But then again, WMP on XP is always prefetched as well, even if you don’t use it (/prefetch:1 switch), I wonder if Firefox and that like is left in fragmented page file section for ‘ferformance’ reasons.
This is all well and good and I understand this. However, Vista is now complaining that I have too many programs open (Excel, FireFox, Word) and I need to shut one down. It states in my resource monitor that I’m using all my memory.
If it’s caching, shouldn’t it be doing so in such a way so as to permit to run these programs?
I’ve got 1.5Gb of RAM. System monitor lists Cached=845Mb and Free=17Mb. I’m not sure where the rest is going.
My pagefile is 955M/3056M.
All this seems really odd. As I write this, the only things open are Task mananger and my browser w/ 1 tab.
Any help?
What I find most amusing is that Windows is implementing more and more features that OS/2 implemented over a decade ago. OS/2 didn’t have prefetch but it was demand pages (of course - the best OSes are, lol). With Warp it also learnt which libraries were needed and initialised the front of the pagefile with them (something I consider to be a really cool idea).
IBMs advice back then was not to close applications because OS/2 would adapt and perform better. That’s why the WPS defaulted to reloading things when you rebooted.
The ultimate irony of course is that people kept moaning about OS/2 and asking why it always used all the RAM 
Is there a performance penalty for switching to the 64bit version of Vista to actually be able to use all 4GB of the RAM, instead of the usual 32bit cap at around 3.5GB? Or am I looking at the same kinds of x32 compatibility issues that I occasionally encounter when running the XP x64?
Whenever I run any game at all on Vista and hit a loading screen, the game minimizes, and a message box pops up saying that Windows is closing the following program to free up memory. I have the “CPU Meter” gadget running all the time, and it generally reports that my CPU usage and RAM usage are nearing 100% whenever this box comes up. At the bottom of this message box is the icon followed by the name of the game I’m playing. If I’m not quick enough (or the game doesn’t minimize fast enough) to hit the cancel button on the message box, Windows closes my game, and I lose everything. This is extremely annoying. Running this one IE7 window and only 3 gadgets, my system is using 55% of my 1.5 GB of RAM. I’d never seen a message like that with XP, and performance was much better in general. I don’t get how this is any help at all.
re os 2 posts above - windows isn’t implementing an os/2 like feature. its making decisions based on your usage history. os/2 didnt do that : )
mac user: what you described for mac - it works very similiar on windows from a basic paging standpoint. your apps you opened remain cached unless the page (memory manager decides something else needs it. its the same as any paged memory system - nothing unique to mac.
however - one issue still is even though 0-5 mb is available, the system still can suffer from the exact same problem xp could - when plenty of swap file space is left - ram usage is maxed out - the window manager goes freaky - half windows show up, etc. and yet… plenty of virtual memory available. the cache isn’t doing a good job then. I was hoping it wouldnt happen in vista - it did… and with less open than I would have in XP. one visual studio, a few IEs, ultra edit, and sql server mngmt studio - neither of the apps taking up more than 100mb (ultra-20mb) - and this issue happened. yet at another time… I was fine. weird. same on 2k, same on xp. same on vista.
Just go with Linux. You can run MS games and products through either wine or crossover linux pro. Ubuntu 7.10 is easier to use then Winblows Vista and with all the eye candy and XGL installed it only uses 128megs out of 2 gig at best. I can run two instances of Virtual box running xp on both and play Quake wars at the same time and it does not even use 50% of my ram. Look up Linux and you will be a happy person.
Is it this, that is called a memory hog and bloatware? Suck up all the memory? And, why do some people claim that gaming runs in par with Windows XP? It is proven that Vista generally has 10-20% lower fps than Windows XP, in the same game.
Im interested to know, a newly freshly installed Vista with no apps installed yet, does it consume 2GB RAM too? How could it do that, when there is no apps installed to prefetch yet? What does it cache? All accessories like MS Paint?
I heard that in Windows XP(?) you can not even turn off the page file. Is it true, even under Vista? I use OpenSolaris with 1GB RAM and Solaris never uses the page file unless it must. After done using the swap file, it tries to flush the swap file immediately. Some people has turned off the swap file under Solaris, completely. It doesnt exist.
Solaris and other Unix generally have a good memory management system as they are from the beginning multiuser enterprise systems with lots of memory. Whereas Windows has it roots from a system that “640KB RAM should be enough for anyone” - and single user.
OS is vista busness with 4 gig ram ,on boot up AVG anti virus and skype are running, this uses 1.07GB of Ram about 35% usage ,
Why is so much ram used before using the computer!
Are there ways of reducing this so as to maximize ram usage with other applications,eg 3dsMax
Thanks anyone
I bought a laptop in July and the other day it was carrying out a routine PC health check (HP Compaq) and the next thing it just went mad. Everything onscreen got bigger as did all the text then smaller then it all went black. I tried to restore but couldn.t. I lost all my emails and everything. All my photos documents my website folder etc. My computer is back to original state when bought. I’m shattered and don’t know what to do. Does anyone know what happened and is there anyway I can get my info back. I’m not greatly literate in this field.
I had vista for about a month, and I was very disappointed.
I have 2gb ram and 2.4 GHz C2D CPU, but Vista just… Doesnt work as it should be. I am on XP now and it works like it should be. Vista not.
Stronghold Crusader/its game from 2001 i think/ starts for 10 second in XP and 30 in Vista. These 20 seconds are not much, but some newer game? How would it run?
Also, everything other is slow too. Visual Studio 2008 starts slower, loads projects slower, compiles slower… Ever when i am doing Alt+Tab I feel it doesnt respond immediately. Theres around 300 millisecond wait… Its done lighting fast on XP. I think its because XP doesnt have these nasty mini-thumbnails like screenshot everywhere. I think this BitBlt or whatsoever is not so fast when there is 20 opened windows… And saving this images in memory also causes trouble.
Imagine a reguar window it 800x600, its 480000 pixels. Multiply it by 20/windows on screen/. And its 9600000 pixels. Every pixel is 32 bit so its 9600000x32 =
307200000 bits. Now divide by 8 and its 38400000 bytes. Or 37500 KB.
36 MB. Its not so little if you think theres tenths of such things in Vista, and they use the RAM very much.
And Vista has many services, some of them very unuseful, and they are “taking part” too. So, Vista is much more heavy than XP its clear. But if i have 8GB RAM, why should I care - because Vista will fill my remaining memory with some programs… And when I want to use some of the RAM - well I have to wait, because Vista must clear up some space. And this is also slower. But Vista doesnt overwhemn the RAM chips, they data is rewritten with every FSB cycle/or I think so?/, to keep the data from disappearing… But this is an automated task. The CPU doesnt have to renew the memory by itslf. But with Vista, it has to, because Vista is using additional clock cycles clearing up some space for running programs. RAM is not cache. Its Operational Memory and so… Sorry for my English too, i am only 13 
For elaine - try looking for programs that can restore deleted files, like Undelete Plus.
As a side note on the game, you might try booting the game and the first map, closing it and reopening it. I find with Unreal Tournament and a system with little RAM, this can help.
The problem I have is not with the amount of ram being used but with Vista bringing my PC to a screaming halt when I have 98% of my ram used.
I’ve benn running Vista Premoium since it was released and it’s been fine up until a few weeks ago. Now within hours of using it it’s used up all my memory to the point that I have to wait over five minutes for the task manager to appear.
What’s the deal with that?
I bought a Compaq Presario laptop on Black Friday.
It comes with Vista Premium, a Dual-Core Intel Pentium CPU (clocked at 1.5GHz) and 1GB RAM.
It’s incredibly slow.
I’m about to install AVG Pro instead of Defender (if I find out how to disable it), and do some Windows Updates.
I just disabled Superfetch, it’s a little faster now. 
Point is,
Why can’t Microsoft do anything right?
Well, XP, on its time, was better than Vista. I think Vista is the largest disappointment after ME.
I will personally stay on XP, because Vista is just the shiny new look…
Until SP2, I think Vista’s not needed.