Crucial disses Vista memory footprint

[LordSimon]

I actually think Crucial is very right in saying Vista is memory hungry. It definitely is. Is it not? I have 2Gb installed and I notice there has been heavy swapping on my hardisk with just Firefox, Outlook opened and a Virus Shield and firewall program running in the background. I check my Task Manager, it was 700Mb physical memory used up, 1.3Gb memory used for caching and a 1.5Gb swap file in use. 2 physical memory available !!!

I never remember my Windows XP needed to swap files in and out with 2Gb of RAM, and everything just appear in a flash. With Vista, all I can say is my hardisk is a lot noisier and most program takes a few more seconds to open. If that is what MS call effective memory management? I would rather stick back with Windows XP because things are much faster even if they say XP has a poorer memory management.

[dangel]

I actually think Crucial is very right in saying Vista is memory hungry. It definitely is. Is it not? I have 2Gb installed and I notice there has been heavy swapping on my hardisk with just Firefox, Outlook opened and a Virus Shield and firewall program running in the background. I check my Task Manager, it was 700Mb physical memory used up, 1.3Gb memory used for caching and a 1.5Gb swap file in use. 2 physical memory available !!!

I never remember my Windows XP needed to swap files in and out with 2Gb of RAM, and everything just appear in a flash. With Vista, all I can say is my hardisk is a lot noisier and most program takes a few more seconds to open. If that is what MS call effective memory management? I would rather stick back with Windows XP because things are much faster even if they say XP has a poorer memory management.

There's something very wrong there - i have several large apps open (VS2005 x 3, Paint Shop Pro 8, MSDN Help X 2, Opera) and it's lightning fast versus XP switching between them.. 1231 cached, 21 free.. (2gb total). I have a 4324M page file (2827M in use), 44% physical memory in use.
The whole point of the caching is for it to use any free physical memory - i've only got '1' free for example.

[rogeraususa]

The speed of your flash memory (in your case, the USB drive) is of great importance. I have a flash drive and an 150x SD card that I tried - and when using the regular speed USB thumbdrive (1GB), I got the jerks. When using the hi-speed 150x SD card (4GB ^^) it was smooth as butter. So it is obvious to me that the two media have dramatic performance differences, and that explains the jerkiness when using the generic standard USB thumbdisk vs the very high speed SD card (intended for accelerating the access/saving images on digital cameras).

Try different media that you might have around and see what performance gains you achieve.

[chuckskull]

Yup vista is memory hungry, but it's much smarter about using it.

Home premium is using 968mb for me right now, FF, utorrent and Foobar open.

Now If I run orthos for 5 mins doing blend test where it needs the ram and then stop. Vista will be using 220mb. Yes Vista uses a lot, but it can make it available to the programs that need it. Vista runs happily enough for desktop tasks with 1GB. I can vouch for that as i did it for a week while i waited for OCuk to deliver my 2GB kit. With 2GB Vista runs far smoother than XP.

I think Vista will perform at it's best with 4GB though and as soon as I've bought a 8800GTS and paid my phonebil I might give it a whirl.

[llandeloyking]

i ran vista rc2 for a long time and found i used to get woken up by my pc in the middle of the night on a very regular basis!even tho i had nothing running but a few background apps like utorrent,it is a quiet pc and although close to my bed i never had this problem when running xp.i'm now running the final version of vista ultimate and it doesnt seem to do it although it has woken me once.i find it a great os which is why ive stuck with it, fast and i have 1 gig of ram installed.

[vrykyl]

lol - Im running vista with 4gb of ddr2@ 400fsb... sitting on the dektop doing nothing vista uses 997mb, with 2.5gb cached...
Turn off superfetch and it goes down to 600mb used, 50mb cached and 3gb free