Windows Vista ships 60m; Milestone ahead: 1b Windows PCs get Vista in next 12 months

babybearbear · Feb 19th, 10, 10:33 AM

Any comments from Windows 7 users? I used Windows 7 irregularly at work. Seems pretty fast to me...though I have never checked the amount of RAM it used.

Quote:

February 17, 2010 04:07 PM ET

Most Windows 7 PCs max out their memory, resulting in performance bottlenecks, a researcher said today.

Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks.

The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory "saturation" point, said Barth. The most recent snapshot of XPnet's 23,000-plus PCs -- taken yesterday -- pegs only 40% of XP systems as running low on memory.

"The vast majority of Windows 7 machines over the last several months are very heavily-memory saturated," said Barth today. "From a performance standpoint, that has an immediate impact on the machine."

The low-memory condition of most Windows 7 PCs is even more notable considering the amount of RAM in Windows 7 systems: According to XPnet's polling, Windows 7 PCs sport an average of 3.3GB of memory, compared to 1.7GB in the average Windows XP computer. (Machines running Windows Vista contain an average of 2.7GB.)

"Windows 7 machines have almost twice as much memory to work with," said Barth, "but the numbers show just how much larger and more complex Windows 7 is than XP....

Full article here:
Most Windows 7 PCs max out memory

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bejean · Feb 19th, 10, 10:36 AM

Recently, i noticed most lappies with win 7 shipped comes with 4 gig DD3 ram, and that should be plenty.

power666 · Feb 19th, 10, 02:03 PM

Vista and Windows 7 were supposed to do disk caching with all the available free memory to boost load times. The idea was for a faster system but the results have been mixed and leaving an impression that Vista and Windows 7 consume far more memory than what they actually use.

-Zero- · Feb 19th, 10, 02:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by power666

Vista and Windows 7 were supposed to do disk caching with all the available free memory to boost load times. The idea was for a faster system but the results have been mixed and leaving an impression that Vista and Windows 7 consume far more memory than what they actually use.

It's not just Windows: Linux also employs a very similar system.

So apparently, OS X is the only *NIX based OS not to offer something as basic as this, and instead choose to confuse people about their 'small' footprint.

power666 · Feb 19th, 10, 04:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by -Zero-

So apparently, OS X is the only *NIX based OS not to offer something as basic as this, and instead choose to confuse people about their 'small' footprint.

I've been under the impression that OS X does perform disk caching.This article goes in depth to OS X's early memory manage schema, including disk caching.

AMATSG · Feb 19th, 10, 06:10 PM

A spam news I think, the writer is also a joker, memory max out at 90% and yet he could not say where it is max out at... An IT nooby also knows how to look, just start task manager and look at the processes/mem usage for the programs....

Don;t waste your time reading.....

lennardseah · Feb 19th, 10, 06:18 PM

misleading article

techniqu · Feb 19th, 10, 11:29 PM

Have to say, even though the caching has been sketchy since vista, this article is incredibly misleading. The RAM being used is all cached data of routinely used programs, and w7 frees up ram whenever necessary. There are times when it's slow to do so and can cause issues, but it should rarely, if ever, cause virtual memory use to make up for lack of RAM.

No one actually working in IT could be this ignorant.

thetarget · Feb 21st, 10, 10:51 AM

Win 7 does use alot of your available memory. Most of those are used at caches, which are not shown in regular task managers/process managers.

I have 8GB of RAM and from what I can see in the resource manager I currently only have 266mb left, 1566MB in used and the rest in stand by. I was doing some graphics work an hour ago.

F@|c0n · Feb 21st, 10, 11:07 AM

i am having 4GB of ram ... everytime i play battlefield.. windows will tell me memory low.. zzzz

watzup_ken · Feb 21st, 10, 04:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bejean

Recently, i noticed most lappies with win 7 shipped comes with 4 gig DD3 ram, and that should be plenty.

Yeah, but most of them runs on Win 7 64 bit which also inherently consumes more memory than its 32 bit counterpart.

Anyway, I don't understand why people are still comparing a new OS to an OS that is release almost a decade ago. The memory requirements are def different isn't it? I think any applications will surely have an increased appetite for memory, not just the OS.

As long as it runs smoothly, I think there is nothing much to complain.

-Zero- · Feb 21st, 10, 08:39 PM

Quote:

Win 7 does use alot of your available memory. Most of those are used at caches, which are not shown in regular task managers/process managers.

I have 8GB of RAM and from what I can see in the resource manager I currently only have 266mb left, 1566MB in used and the rest in stand by. I was doing some graphics work an hour ago.

Yep, that's the way it's supposed to work. The tooltip in my earlier Linux screenshot should further reinforce that point.

Right now the question most people will probably be concerned about is whether Windows knows how to automatically release the cached memory when the system or the applications need more resources.

But given that this whole memory cache thing was already introduced back in Vista, i say Microsoft should have already gotten a good understanding of how the whole thing works, so i'll probably just go out on a limb and presume that Windows 7 does know how to free up the cached memory as and when needed.