Free RAM is wasted RAM. 
Oh your a real tool.
Jeff,
While I agree that any RAM sitting empty is a waste, I donât think filling it up completely would be a good idea either. If as you say, SuperFetch has predicted your usage correctly and filled your RAM to the brim, there should be no problems. However, if it predicted wrong (a situation similar to a cache miss), then the overhead for swapping out existing memory would be too huge, with the result being the system would be non-responsive every time SuperFetch predicted wrong. No matter how perfect an algorithm may be, filling all your RAM all the time seems like a bad idea to me.
Microsoft has invented artificial intelligence? In their propaganda material they mention superfetch is smart all the time, but there is no real proof that it is so. So we should believe on their word?
Even if that is so, how do we know what is it using its âbrainsâ for? Doesnât it (now or in the future) start working against competitorsâ products (for example, other office suites)? Who does it work for? Us (the users) or Microsoftâs shareholders?
The amount of power taken off userâs hands is unacceptable.
Hereâs a solution for some users, but not all.
This might be the problem many people are running into: Vista automatically allocates 50% of all RAM to SYSTEM services. For example, if you have, say, 3GB of RAM and you tell your program that it can allocate 2GB, it will crash once it tries to go beyond 1.5GB.
You can get around this by directly editing, in the boot control file, the amount of RAM that Vista allocates for USER programs.
Hereâs how I set it for a 4GB system, to solve this problem that was crashing my video rendering:
-
Open the Command Prompt as the administrator. Youâll find it in the Accessories folder in your programs menu. To open as the admin, youâll see the option âRun as AdminâŚâ in the context menu (that thing that pops up when you right click an object).
-
Enter: bcdedit /set increaseuserva 3072
This configures Vista to allow USER processes to access 3GB of RAM instead of only 2GB.
- Restart (Everyone running Vista has probably mastered doing this by now!)
Note: The internal variable âincreaseuservaâ can only be set between 2048 (2GB) and 3072 (3GB), so this isnât really helpful for anyone running less than or equal to 2GB. For those of you running 3-4GB Iâd recommended always leaving Vista at least 1GB (though it doesnât give you much moving room to choose anyway).
Hope this helps some. I know it worked on my officeâs system I configured.
To anyone buying a new system (particularly a desktop), Iâd say donât even bother with a 32-bit OS and go straight to a 64-bit OS. From my vantage point Vista is really Microsoftâs final attempt at squeezing all the life (and money) out of the 32-bit architecture, since with a minimum requirement of 2GB of RAM and a maximum of capacity of 4GB, youâre not going to last out the decade on anything running 32-bit.
Fascinating discussion. I am, confessedly, a MS basher, because it is the OS for Dummies. That being said, I havenât jumped to Linux because it is the OS for people with enough time to tweak everything. I am neither, so, by default, I take the dummyâs way out. However, I have run across this problem: trying to open a 300meg app, I keep getting the message that there is not enough memory to accomplish the task. Now, having read through the discussion, I understand why task manaager shows me I have no system memory. Problem is, if available memory is only in the cache, why doesnât the cache serve it up so I can open the app (actually, app installer)? Actually, Iâve been pretty happy with some of the improvements in Vistas dialog box choices, such as beinb able to move two a file with the same name to folder and have the option to have it auto-renamed, verus just overwrite or forget it, which is a nuisance in batch moves. And I donât like MSâs games as much, but theyâve all been deleted anyway, so big deal. But now Iâve hit this snag, and it reinforces the problem with MSâevery two years I have to waste a few weeks of my time being an IT guy. So, at roughly $1200 a week in lost revenue, MS costs me about $1200 a year to own. But maybe it would take 4 weeks to figure out Linux and this is indeed a bargain.
PS â Athlon 64 Dual Core, 2GB 5300 DDR2. No graphics card, so Iâm probably losing a lot to shared graphics. Intent to fix that soon. Just got the thing.
i just bought a laptop running vista with intel core 2 duo, 4MB cache, and 2 GB of RAM. Any late advice for managing my memory limitations with vista if i want to run games more than programs.
Itâs really anoying everytime I hear this stupid explanation about Vista memory usage. Itâs like telling about a car that can go 9000 miles on a tank of gas, but the tank is the size of 2 buses.
Here is teh deal, it makes sense about caching a lot in memory but what is the ACTUAL benifit? Not the INTENDED benifit, what is the REAL benifit cause itâs NOT system performance! Is Vista faster than a solid XP/2000 system? Nope, actually slower because since the memory is loaded up all the time the system quickly goes into the page file which bogs the machine down. Whenever there is more than like 1.3GB RAM in use my sytem starts to crawl. So in previous OSs I had controlâŚdonât run too many apps and usually the sytem rocks, but now even if Iâ only runing a few things itâs a big deal since I have much less RAM available. Basically it looks like Vista needs 4GB RAM because itâs memory usage is sloppy, not genius.
Alright I read the majority of these comments, and so I should post my thoughts as well.
Personally I am ANGRY at Vista using my ram as a cache, and Iâll tell you why. For the past year (really 1.5 years), I used XP with 128 mb of ram. Truly, I cannot express how awful that time of my life was.
But the story ends well, I purchased a new system not a week ago. Quad-core (Core 2 Quad Q6600), with 2 GB DDR2 800mhz, and a GeForce 8600, that came with Vista Home Premium. For me, a paging file should not have to exist, I have more than enough ram (soon Iâll have 4GB at least, so there). However, I donât mind paging files, and I do not mind Vista using some of my ram (because there is more than I really need, at least at this point in time), but DID THEY HAVE TO MAKE THE STUPID THING USE ALL OF MY RAM.
I did experience the lag that people have been describing. I opened the speech recognition program in Vista, and it must not have guessed I was going to use it (Free Ram = 0, from task manager), and so my computer lagged for 5 seconds or so while it thrashed. SuperFetch failed me, my system should remain responsive at all times (barring rouge programs and other such factors).
For me, this is UNACCEPTABLE. No matter how advanced the algorithms are for SuperFetch, and unless I have an absurd amount of ram (enough to cache everything + at least 2 GB free for anything else), then SuperFetch will always be a bad idea, at least how it is now.
I wonder why I canât just tell SuperFetch that it can have free reign over 50% of my ram. Honestly I think itâs a superb idea to allow SuperFetch at least 300-512 MB of ram! By caching the top 3 or 4 of my most used programs, I imagine there could be a significant performance boost to be had, but as it stands I do not know of a way to limit how much ram SuperFetch uses, and so it is being shut off. My reasoning for this is as follows.
Iâve stated that SuperFetch CANNOT predict well what I will do, humans are hard to predict, especially myself, which is why I think it is futile to fill my ram to capacity with âeducated guessesâ of what I might use. Iâm not going to use all of it, or even any of it. I believe that SuperFetch suffers from DIMINISHING RETURNS.
In other words, there is lots of performance gains for the first 25-50% of ram that is filled (I would say the top 5 most commonly used programs would suffice), but after that, you really arenât getting anything out of using the entirety of ram-space as a cache.
Microsoft needs to put more options in the hands of the consumer, because there are obviously disagreements about how beneficial SuperFetch is currently, and because people use computers for so many different things, SuperFetch should be more configurable by the user.
My question to you Jeff Williams and everybody elseâŚdoes superfetch really make ANYTHING faster? I use IE and Media center EVERY dayâŚso they should be in my cache right? At least they are faster right? No! Nothing is faster.
Iâll just be blunt, I do not see any performance advantages to Vista. The main difference I see are in a few conveneince features that frankly could have been added to W2k and WXP. Compare the performance nightmare that was w95 and wme to the clearly more stable win98, then compare that to very obviously faster and more stable WinNT and W2k. Thats where advancement stopped(for meâŚI never had XP)âŚ
I was thinking that games are more advanced, but is that Vista? I think itâs more the graphics cards and CPUs that have steppped up.
Well this certainly clears up some questions i had. I have a friend that is getting vista Ultimate and is sharing the key with me. But he is hoping and me as well that 6 gigs of mem would curb the demanding uses of ram that superfetch causes. Now i know that there is no hope unless ditching superfetch altogether. Weâre both running raid 0 so accessing any program wouldnât be an issue anyhow and actually negates the need for superfetch in the first place. I also agree that Superfetch will never be a good psychic so whatâs the point of superfetch again? I never know what iâm going to do when i load up my machine and i think it would be safe to say that 70 percent of people donât. I guess the biggest performance problems with vista is the bugs that are in it. I can easily and simply just disable the worthless feature of superfetch which is what iâll do but the millions of bugs in vista needs to be fixed.
I have been strugling with a probleme for a while now, and I didnât get much help from the Toshiba support. Its like my new Toshiba has a memory probleme, but I dont know if its caused by Windows Vista or if its HW related.
This is what happens:
When I surf with IE7 og have more than 7 tabs open at the same time, its like windows runs out of memory, all of a sudden I cant open any new tabs and right click on the touchpad does not react. If I then minimize IE7 and right click on the desktop nothing happens either.
If I then close a couple of programs (its only Yahoo messenger og coreTemp that are running(coreTemp shows how warm your cpu is, and min is constantly between 56 og 64 degrees celsius)), then right click works again.
Usually when this happens I cant even get the taskmanager up, but if I close Yahoo Messenger then I can, and now I can see that there is used about 47% memory, under proceses i can see that:
Yahoo uses up to 50MB,
Iexplorer 27 - 150MB
og Dwm.exe takes up to 120MB.
The problem also happens if Yahoo is not started, so thats not the cause.
I have disabled aero and use minimal of all the things Vista comes with, so the I get max. performance following most of the instructions from www.Vistaguide.dk but the probleme persist every time I use IE and use more than 7 tabs (This should not happen, and using more than 7 tabs is perfectly normal).
Besides surfing on the net, I use it for playing video by VLC or GOM player, and music by Winamp. I dont play games.
Here it never runs out of memory.
Its Vista Home Premium Danish and in general I think it runs worse than Home Basic did on 2GB ram.
My laptop is an Toshiba satellite L40-139:
Intel Celeron M 520 1.6Ghz, 2GB DDR II 667Mhz(that fits the model), Toshiba 120GB S-ata HDD, Atheros Wi-fi, Intel 943GML Chipset.
Comes with Norton Internet security pre-installed.
I have set auto tunning to High: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglev=high
It did not solve the probleme.
Basically its like Vista simply runs out of memory, but I can see in taskmanager that is not the case since there is only used 47% of 2GB Ram together with a swapfile of 4096MB.
What I dont get is that there is other people who have a similair systeme and they dont have this probleme.
I scanned for virus and other dirt with Dr. Web Cure it and it didnât find anything neither did Norton.
The things that I think might be causing this is :
- Norton Internet Security 2007, that might have an flaw that makes this happen.
- The CPU is has an 533Mhz FSB and the Ram has 667Mhz FSB (should only be a probleme if the Ram was slower than the CPU). Memtest says they are OK.
- Vista has an error that makes it not releasing the memory again, but it just stacks up until the error happens.
- That there is an flaw in my CPU or in the chipset.
If its 4, does anyone have a programme so I can test this?
The probleme has been there ever since I bought it and even with the original Ram inserted.
Anyone know a solution for this?
With kind regards
JBJ
Iâve stated that SuperFetch CANNOT predict well what I will do, humans are hard to predict, especially myself
Strange, the other caches on your CPU seem to work OK at predicting what you will do⌠or at least what the code running on your PC will do.
When I surf with IE7 og have more than 7 tabs open at the same time, its like windows runs out of memory, all of a sudden I cant open any new tabs and right click on the touchpad does not react.
You are running into thisâŚ
I dont care what you say, vista is not worth anything. Is a ploy to cache you cash. The fact is that on every vista system we have everything runs slower than XP, FACT! The new machine have more memory and faster processors, duel core even, and vista cant do anything right.
Oh and dont forget that guy that showed you can run the MS game on XP with a hack and installing directX 10. And yes, they run faster than vista.
It appears that Vista is a resource hog big time. I have the HP Tablet PC tx1000 and out of the box I spent almost 3 hours uninstalling the bloatware that came with it, i.e. Vongo, etc. because I figured that was the problem regarding my resources. This machine has 2GB of RAM upgradable to 4GB so needless to say I will be upgrading it soon. Just for the system to boot run idle with no applications running I am using between 900-1000GB, itâs ridiculous.
Iâve actually finally made the leap to Vista Ultimate SP1 from XP, and Iâm happy with the new OS. The darn thing boots to the login screen in 12 seconds, desktop instantly responsive in 3 seconds after credentials, and my programs (like VS2008) load instantaneously.
Sure, it is running on a 2.4 GHZ Quad Core on a 1333mhz FSB motherboard with 4GB of 800mhz DDR2 ram, and a 7200rpm SATA-300 driveâŚ
But I guess my point is - as long as it performs as expected - which it does - Iâm happy as sin.
I also thought that Vista was crap and was bloated⌠but i took my friends copy of vista which he got on a computer that doesnt work anymoreâŚ
and I dual booted XP⌠and when i first ran it i obviously liked it⌠iv used it before⌠but i only liked the visuals and effects⌠thats what drew my attention and so then i start XP and it seemed a lot faster so i looked up ways to make vista faster and i turned off a bunch of services and features i didnt need and a lot of the visuals that i dont need and vista still has the cool aero effect⌠and so i was still thinking XP was faster but after about 4 days its beein going really fast it loads my programs a hell of a lot faster then XP! some things run slower and it says im using a crap load of memory that i know im not using⌠but it loads stuff like none other right when i open the computer up after i turn it off! i almost like vista better then xp which i never thought id ever say⌠and i cant wait to try the ReadyBoost but i dont have a flash drive yet 
should speed things up with the help of SuperFetch combined with ReadyBoost
I had problems running XP sp2 (slow operation with low virtual memory msgs on 2GB - and I am not even talking about all the other âmakes-me-wanna-curseâ stuff to deal with like viruses, crashes, spam, upkeep, defragmentation, re-installation - I can re-install XP with eyes closed - security patches, updates for this and that and other (and not legitimate updates but screw-up-quick-fixes that will need to be patched up later on, too).
Then I âborrowedâ VISTA key. Well, in short, I was NOT impressed, so I went out and bought an additional 2GB of RAM. 4GB should help, I thought. Yeah, right! Vista took itâs time switching between apps 4GB or not even under modest use (my old 2003 PC could handle it better, with 256MB of RAM, I kid you not!). How much RAM do we need to have before Microsoftâs S!*T works? 32GB of RAM? 128? How much? What processors do we need to run a couple of tabs on IE? I can just see the ads on TV: Intelâs new 24 linked SuperDUPER Double Quad duo Quattro XEON x 4 CORE PRO processor IS THE BEST!!! Make sure Itâs Super DUPER INSIDE! This is pathetic, no?
And then it hit me (actually it hit me when I lost AutoCAD file I spent two hours working on - on a freshly re-installed XP). And I thought about how much time and effort I was spending on everything OTHER THAN work and fun things on a computer - like fixing, troubleshooting, re-installing, cleaning, even (no-offence, guys) reading blogs like this for hours on end and others about which Antivirus is better, what are the latest security flaws were discovered in Windows or IE or Messenger or whateverâŚ
And I told myself screw this! My time and my health (with all the frustration from PC) are just not worth it! I went to Apple an ordered new 24 inch iMac. Impulsive? YES! And I have 2 grand less, which, well, sucks. But now, a month after, I see that that was one of the smartest decisions I made in a long time! Everything on a Mac just works, and I donât even know how to use it! No viruses, no crashes, everything is fast, elegant and - brace for it - INTUITIVE! Mcrosoft is as intuitive as counting sheep by number of legs they have - try to
explain Ctrl+Alt+Del to someone who never used a PC⌠Good Luck!
The funniest thing is my iMac came with ONLY 1GB of RAM. And yes you can get more if you want to, but I have hard time justifying it - everything I do is just about instantenious!
Get a Mac and youâll forget most of the computer terminology - youâll never have to use it! Computer today is a creative and entertainment tool, and if you are not using yours for work or fun whatâs the point
?
i donât know much about computers so i need help. my recently bought computer, a quad core with 2.4ghz, 5gb ram, e-GeForce 8800GT 512MB, and runs on windows vista 32bit home edition, is really slow.
when i click on firefox or internet explorer it takes 10min to open up(i run on cable )and to goto a website it takes 2-3mins and most of the time it just wonât go. downloading stuff is fine and all but starting the download takes forever.
another problem would be the video. most of the time i watch a movie(.avi, .mkv, .mp4, .omg) its all laggy and glitchy. the sound just follows the glicthy movie.
i did a full computer scan and it said the hardware and hard drive is running perfectly and theres no virus or spyware on my computer(scanned with mcafee. and turning the computer on and off is fast
i seriously need help the slowness is killing me.
Thanks in advance and sorry if some of the stuff i wrote down seems stupid
to idunno,
Itâs hard to see what could be the cause of your problems. Did you have this before? Or did it start happening after you installed something.
Vista generally is slow after a fresh install because itâs caching everything (for search and stuff).
Also, I believe you can only utilize 3 Gigs if you are using a 32 bit system, switch to 64 (This could be a reason why your system is slow⌠not sure though)