Microsoft Windows Vista: How much memory is enough?

[Sharktooth]

not everyone knows how to optimize his system expecially the average joe. even computer experts may want to spend their time in tasks other than spending hours optimizing their OS... consider also tweaking XP and Vista is a whole different story.
the only reasons the average joe would buy Vista are the nice interface and DX10. If you turn off the nice interface (Aero) you're loosing 50% of the fun...
You may ask "what about security?" and my answer is "security is a joke in vista":
Unfortunately, UAC is not perfect. On her blog, Joanna Rutkowska details several flaws in Vista's UAC implementation that are potentially exploitable. For example, software installers are always allowed to run with full administrative privilege, just like in old-fashioned Windows. In addition, Symantec security analyst Ollie Whitehouse points out that Vista ships with executables that can be used to compromise UAC.
Microsoft has added numerous other features to Windows Vista besides UAC, many of which are intended to increase the overall security of the OS. But upon closer examination these add-ons are only marginal improvements over previous versions of Windows.
... In other words, Vista’s firewall won’t provide significantly more protection than the one included in XP SP2 without manual configuration.
A new program called Windows Defender adds anti-malware capabilities to Windows, but it’s primarily consumer-focused and so far does not seem to be up to par with the major aftermarket options already available for XP. According to competing anti-malware vendor Webroot, Windows Defender misses the vast majority of spyware. Worse, in February Windows Defender was shown to actually be a vector for attack on Vista, with the disclosure of an exploitable bug in Microsoft’s malware detection engine. Similarly, while Vista includes a new hard drive encryption feature called BitLocker, it is not enabled by default, and whether it offers any real protection against advanced computer forensics techniques is questionable.
and so on...
however the principal fact is there are oustanding differencies in how XP and Vista (out of the box) are performing.
Vista ultimate x64 is the ultimate sucker and hogger...
Vista includes all the fancy add-ons (one care, UAC...) that should make Vista secure.
But as we seen (and proved) Vista is a "hey! nice try!" at security but not enough at all, while filled with tools (i just like to call them crap) that compromise the performance (by rising memory usage and eating CPU cycles) and some of them, paradoxally, even security.

[deets]

as a regular user of vista i can say its more like XP+ but cost more to get it to run at the same sort of speeds as XP.

I do wonder if the old thing applies, the more someone pays for a product, the more they need to defend it to appease their crazy purchasing decisions.

im neither pro or against MS. I have vista 64 and i do struggle to work out what benefit this gives me over my old xp 32 bit, apart from having to pay out for twice and much ram to get it to run smoothly :p

sorry if thats not scientific enough :p

[Surf]

I am chiming in with a slight off-topic pipe dream....

Remember the ramdrive back in DOS? How about a wizard utilize the remaining 512mb off the 4gib rig?

[JohnnyMalaria]

I have vista 64 and i do struggle to work out what benefit this gives me over my old xp 32 bit, apart from having to pay out for twice and much ram to get it to run smoothly :p

Right now, not much. The benefits of Vista 64-bit will come when 64-bit software becomes more available. People will argue that XP Pro x64 would be better but, for most users, it isn't readily available.

sorry if thats not scientific enough :p

np - you're not spouting the odds about this, that and the other as if it were absolutely gospel :)

[foxyshadis]

Er, Sharktooth, OneCare doesn't come with Vista at all, it's as much a retail product as Office is, and it's made for both XP and Vista.

I am chiming in with a slight off-topic pipe dream....

Remember the ramdrive back in DOS? How about a wizard utilize the remaining 512mb off the 4gib rig?

It's not that the memory is unavailable to Windows, but that it's simply not physically addressable at all under a 32-bit OS. When you try to access it, the BIOS will give you something like video card memory, the network card cache, chunks of the chipset, or whatever else happens to be mapped into the upper area. Making that a ramdrive wouldn't change that. In 64-bit mode none of this is the case, of course.

There are plenty of ramdrive products on the market if you do want one, though the performance benefits are very small except in specific situations.

[Sharktooth]

IIRC vista ultimate comes with windows defender, firewall, etc...

[Shinigami-Sama]

It's not that the memory is unavailable to Windows, but that it's simply not physically addressable at all under a 32-bit OS. When you try to access it, the BIOS will give you something like video card memory, the network card cache, chunks of the chipset, or whatever else happens to be mapped into the upper area. Making that a ramdrive wouldn't change that. In 64-bit mode none of this is the case, of course.

There are plenty of ramdrive products on the market if you do want one, though the performance benefits are very small except in specific situations.

I had always thought that was on different memory buses not on the primary memory bus
thats what we learned for A+
o.O

[Sharktooth]

well that was BS... :)
peripherals are mapped into ram for fast access. win32 (and not the BIOS) reserves the "high" area (over 3.25Gb) for that purpouse.

[Waleska]

Waleska you claim no performance benefit. Yet, we see Vista booting faster than XP. And Vista being faster in memory benchmarks to name two examples

"We see"?, sorry but I don't. Do show the benchmarks.

The additional security you ignore, all with all the other features. Just because Aero is all a simplistic user see's, does not mean thats the extent of the changes.

I'm not the kind of person who trusts her own security to the same people who brought us netbios. I use third party software for such purpose.

Aero is barely just a candywrapper, an unjustifiedly resource-hungry and poorly optimized (just like the rest of the OS) candywrapper that looks like arse. My XP desktop bears less fanciness than a glass teletype yet this doesn't cripple it's fucntionality whatsoever. Makes me wonder what would remain of Vista without the GUI...pretty much nothing.

Reliability and even usability in operative systems take YEARS of crash 'n' burn development after the initial release, and Vista certainly isn't the exception.

[mpucoder]

"I'm not the kind of person who trusts her own security to the same people who brought us netbios.

Like many things in Windows and other Microsoft products, Netbios was "assimilated", here is the history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBIOS#History)

[outsiders71]

A lot of M$/Vista bashing going on here. I've been a Vista 32bit user since the day it was released. Before that I used XP, 2000, 98ME/SE, and yes... 95.

Anyways there's always going to be haters of M$ products and that's fine. As a gamer however I cannot depend on Apple or Linux to meet my needs and therefore do not bother with them. My rig is sadly outdated, near 4 years old (nforce2 mobo, AMD 2800, 1gig ram). Vista handles my games the same way XP did, I have not seen any degradation in frame rates or performance. I will note that I did have some hardware incompatibilities but that's due to old hardware. If you like XP and your hardware is compatible with Vista (M$ has a hardware compatibility checker), there's no reason not to upgrade to Vista. I will never look back to XP.

As a M$ user it is common sense that their products are going to be under attack more frequently. Their products are used more and therefore are targeted more. If you are so worried about security, you shouldn't rely solely on the OS to protect you. Get a virus scanner, setup a firewall (software or hardware), and encrypt any important files. It's not that hard really, and the threat is definitely not worth installing an inferior operating system such as Linux.

[foxyshadis]

Startup speed is sort of a red herring, the speed is really completely dependent on how much junk you install. If you have nothing much, it's always fast. Vista has support for NCQ and disk access prioritization to help, that can make heavily-loaded startups faster, but in the end it all comes down to how much extra you have. I can't do any kind of benchmarks because I have totally different software on my work system's Vista partition (and I still don't use it that often, I hate transferring settings and reinstalling things).

[Bathrone]

Foxyshadis the startup in Vista is very different to XP. For example Vista uses a technology like ramdisc during the startup.

To the others that are calling Vista bloated I think it depends on what bloat actually is. If your talking about the search indexer process running at idle cpu times to make searching better I think thats good. If your talking about the smart caching Vista has that actually develops a model of your computer use patterns and optimally configures caching for those I think think thats good too.

If you dont like it, turn it off.

Because Vista is a GUI OS its simple to do things. Try using Linux! In no time you'll be hassled with arcane sudo terminal commands and manually editing conf files that otherwise would be simple and easy.

[deets]

there is always MS bashing of some sort. Wouldn't it be nice if each situation could be judged on its own merit, no agenda to prove. thats one of the reasons i dislike some of the pro apple brigade, its a corporation your in love with, have some self respect!

As for vista, i actually think its a good OS in its own right. It works well, has a modern look and feel and does improve on a lot of things.

saying that, its not a big leap from XP, which is also a good OS. My thinking also includes the price, for OEM or systems that include it, its fine, do not go get the boxed version if you use XP unless your very rich.

Vista also had a lot of bugs to work through using the consumer as a test bed, bad news, but sort of expected with so much code. This and the lower spec of machines when launched has led to a larger than deserved negative response for vista i feel. I know some folk who have it on laptops and understandably its a nightmare.

In six months 2gb of ram will be the norm (if not more) on most dekstop PC's and home builders can already pick it up quite cheaply. Graphics cards are coming down in price as nvidia and ATI push their top spec cards, so a aero vista card will be very cheap very soon, if not already.

Vista is a step forward, just not too sure how big a step that is and in 6 months it will run on most new machines well, maybe turning opinion towards it a little more.

[Sharktooth]

editing some "arcane" text files is much easier than finding arcane keys in the registry...
also, what's difficult in putting a CD or DVD in the unit and reboot? oh right, windows needs to be installed to work...

[JohnnyMalaria]

IIRC vista ultimate comes with windows defender, firewall, etc...

I'm afraid your recollection isn't quite right.

What Ultimate has that Premium doesn't:

Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore
Windows Fax and Scan
Remote Desktop Connection
Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption

I make no judgement on the usefulness or otherwise of these.

See http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/choose.mspx for feature comparisons.

Look at Home Basic - Oh dear!

[Sharktooth]

i meant Vista... dunno why i added ultimate...
however the point is windows defender sux at malware detection and the vista firewall doesnt scan outgoing traffic by default...
so the "added" security is more like a marketing stunt...
you can get better products for free and have a better security level (than the Vista crappy stuff) on XP...

[thearklight]

Jumping at the end of a thread, so don't bash me if i repeat something,

but I got my Vista from a certain
manufacturer where you can turn
all that fancy aero stuff off.
Everything to the BARE MINIMUM needed.

I had to do this because my computer
started to slowly grind to a halt.

And guess what. It's still slower than XP.
And on an older machine! and that's with
over a gig of RAM.

Plus you will need a even
a cheap GAMERS graphics
Card to run it well even
if you are not a gamer.

this was not what I expected
when I got a brand new machine.

Oh yes, now my Scanner
don't work because they
are not supported under
VISTA something microsoft
and the retailer forgot to
print or verbally advise me.
And no, the manufacturers
(HP) are not planning on
creating driver support
for these machines under Vista.

so plan on buying new pheripherals
if you have old ones.

Heri.

[outsiders71]

i meant Vista... dunno why i added ultimate...
however the point is windows defender sux at malware detection and the vista firewall doesnt scan outgoing traffic by default...
so the "added" security is more like a marketing stunt...
you can get better products for free and have a better security level (than the Vista crappy stuff) on XP...

What forces you to ONLY depend on windows defender and windows firewall? Only a novice computer user who doesn't care about their security would depend on these alone. I think these programs are better than having nothing, and the fact they are installed with the OS makes it easier on you. However I choose not to use them because I use alternatives. It's the same with IE, Outlook and WMP. You are not forced to solely use that software, there are free alternatives. Next your going to complain that the calculator tool that Vista comes with is inferior to X and therefore Vista blows.

[Carpo]

1gb of ram is not enough for vista - having tested it out i found that it was using 400meg plus and that was after a fresh install, even turning off the services i knew what was what (how many new services does vista have and which do you need) i managed to get it down by about 30meg and turning off areo saved anouther 25meg+.

maybe when sp1 comes out they may very well fix many of the issues ppl have been having - one example i can give is that a so called critical update i installed trashed vista, and looking on ms site even says they are aware under certain instances that can happen and a re-install is required!!!

over all once you get past the eye candy its really just win2k3 server with a few areas re-writen. like most things some ppl have no problems with it - some ppl do, it just needs a little bit more time and patches/updates to make it stable/usable.

still any os that requires more than 1gb of mem is a bit much, then again bill did say once that he couldnt see ppl needing more than 640K of mem ;)

[outsiders71]

1gb of ram is not enough for vista - having tested it out i found that it was using 400meg plus and that was after a fresh install, even turning off the services i knew what was what (how many new services does vista have and which do you need) i managed to get it down by about 30meg and turning off areo saved anouther 25meg+.

maybe when sp1 comes out they may very well fix many of the issues ppl have been having - one example i can give is that a so called critical update i installed trashed vista, and looking on ms site even says they are aware under certain instances that can happen and a re-install is required!!!

over all once you get past the eye candy its really just win2k3 server with a few areas re-writen. like most things some ppl have no problems with it - some ppl do, it just needs a little bit more time and patches/updates to make it stable/usable.

still any os that requires more than 1gb of mem is a bit much, then again bill did say once that he couldnt see ppl needing more than 640K of mem ;)

You don't need 1 gig of ram to run or install Vista. You need 1 gig of ram to use Aero. Also it doesn't matter how many services you disable or turn off, Vista will delegate all the free memory to programs currently in use.

[Carpo]

i never said you need 1gb just to install i said you need 1gb plus when using vista, like i do in xp i turn off services i do not require and/or need - by doing thise you do recovery mem used, in vista there are many more that are rather cryptic in their descriptions and god forbid you turn of the wrong service then vista goes mental, as from what i have seen a lot of them depend on each other.

still im not bashing vista im just saying that on the hardware i have here its not stable or in a usable state - as with many things mileage will vary :)

[foxyshadis]

Oh yes, now my Scanner
don't work because they
are not supported under
VISTA something microsoft
and the retailer forgot to
print or verbally advise me.
And no, the manufacturers
(HP) are not planning on
creating driver support
for these machines under Vista.

That's because HP has gone from one of the most respected to the absolute least respected global IT company. Buy from a company that doesn't base their business model around making you buy again every time you upgrade, or planned obsolescence even if you don't.

[Shinigami-Sama]

thats also the same reason many companies still have a win2k print server
the drivers have issues with 2k3
but they do make good equipment if you get the older models but they really are slipping..

[Sharktooth]

just for comparison check those youtube videos about the compiz fusion (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=compiz+fusion&search=Search) or beryl (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=axgl&search=Search) capabilities on linux in conjunction with A/XGL:
as a sidenote i have it running and working perfectly smooth on an Athlon 800 (the Slot A version!) with a Radeon 7000 (a super crappy PS 1.0 video card with ridiculous 3D acceleration) and 256MB of RAM...
i still wonder why Vista needs a PS2.0 card, 1GB of ram and a modern CPU to have Aero enabled...

[Shinigami-Sama]

I had XGL and compiz-fusion running my compaq laptop
autodected and configured everything, had all the effects cranked and still worked fine
even in the live enviroment
this laptop only has one gig of memory as well, and a radeon 200m mobile videocard

[OvejaNegra]

A few comments as a network administrator in a country where MSoft is 80% and linux the other 20% and there are MANY people using very old computers (like 486dx2, pentium 200MHz MMX, pentium2 450MHz and doing some magic with old servers and old cumputers:
-ALL the big projects has bugs (like X264)
-MSoft is ALWAYS attacked and linux NOT
-ALL the operative systems has scurity holes, usually the time heals those holes
-The hardware is improving with the time, so the software MUST improve too (and of course EAT that hardware):
X264 is a VERY nice work but it needs a faster cpu.
BUT if you have a 800MHz CPU, XVID will be your friend, you CANNOT switch.
The games with pixel shader 2/3 and textures of 1024X1024 look nice, but you need a lot of ram and a capable card if you wanna play.
The newer (even if it's linux) will need more hardware, of course, linux is more conservative but still needs more with the time.

Sharktooth: There are A LOT of lies about windows security floating in internet (i'm talking as a person who check those lies). AND YES, there are some REAL security holes that are not in the news, but they are always fixed in the updates. Please don't believe all you read about windows/linux. Linux fans defend linux, windows fans defend windows. Windows haters ******* windows. Linux haters ******* X2 linux.


Everybody:
My opinion?
"The best software is the software that resolves your problems"

You like games? Maybe you need windows
You like free sofware? Maybe you need linux
You like Audio / Video edition + nice working enviroment and some other things i like? Maybe you need APPLE+MAC

You like security: You need the system better support (the fixes are released faster)

You have old computer? W95/older linux
You want DVD/HDDVD/BD SUPER authoring -> Scenarist
" " all this but you are not avanced user -> dvd architect or something like that.

YOUR personal NEEDS make something usable for you.

PAL may look better but i live in NTSC area
You like the grain remover filters but i'm anime encoder, so i don't need them.

Just my opinion
sorry for the english
PD: PLEASE ask about security questions to some one related, there are a lot of myths over there

I have a Celeron 1.2 GHZ with 500MB ram and 70 GB in a broken disk (with some damaged clusters) and an aTI rage 128 /32MB DX7 card.

I have WXP pro and i DON't have problems with memory, but i don't do hard work i my computer like encoding or gamin. It's enough for me
Thanks
Don't fight

[Bathrone]

I actually like Compiz Fusion. One of the many things I dislike about *nix has been the lack of eye candy.

Believe me, I had attempted to get into *nix (just like the macbook pro our family has Im no windows zealot) and like many things I encountered with *nix, Compiz fusion did not work. Hours spent on forums trying to get help resulted in wasted time and basically the statement to drop ati and buy an Nvidia graphics card. This, ontop of other experiences I have had with various *nix distros always ends up with me deleting the partitions and sticking with Windows, which actually works and has good device support.

*nix just plain isnt reliable enough. If its not for all the bugs, you then get hit with poor device support and no native directx for gaming. Have a look at the review a bloke did recently on Ubuntu feisty and his laptop. Mark Shuttleworth even admitted that it wasnt ready for mainstream when the journalist spoke to Mark about this review. The *nix fanbois can sook all they want but the basic truth is is just plain buggy.

I would much prefer to pay nothing for my operating system but the basic fact is *nix is not a viable alternative desktop OS right now.

[communist]

*nix just plain isnt reliable enough. If its not for all the bugs, you then get hit with poor device support and no native directx for gaming.
The *nix fanbois can sook all they want but the basic truth is is just plain buggy.

Haha... please go troll somewhere else.

[Bathrone]

Communist try to get yourself some rational thinking skills. I do not expect you to unilaterally agree with my argument, but in order to have any quality from your arguments you need atleast to address my position. To say I'm trolling because you don't agree with my point of view is really just childish.

[Hard Core Rikki]

Linux is never criticized? Seems you missed the Novell and Xandros mud throwing parties ;)

Any party that tries to enforce its own shady agendas despite reluctance from the public, is likely to be criticed and opposed. Linux mostly isn't criticized *specifically* because much of it is the very product of the public's desires and expectations. You cant enforce anything on people that can just vote with their feet and build better cities elsewhere ;) . A nice enough example would be the demise of XFree.


There is no "native DirectX for gaming" on Linux anyway. The main issue lies within imperfect graphic drivers. The rest can safely be assumed to be copyprotection issues (as with rootkit-protected games, like Lineage2, which used to work when there was no GameGuard). That concern is easy to dismiss since Cedega provides a convenient solution to that.

Linux might not always have the latest hardware supported, but a community of hobbyist can only do so much, in the absence of documentation and open specs.


Back on topic, Vista really is a memory hog. Quite too sluggyish, especially given XP's superior performance on similar hardware. Unless SP1 corrects these flaws significantly, *without* creating new one (privacy-centered for example), it just doesnt feel worth the hassle to "downgrade" to Vista ;)
PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu seem wiser choices. Why complain?

[communist]

Communist try to get yourself some rational thinking skills. I do not expect you to unilaterally agree with my argument, but in order to have any quality from your arguments you need atleast to address my position. To say I'm trolling because you don't agree with my point of view is really just childish.
You asserted that *nix is plain buggy - which is plain wrong. That it is not reliable - again wrong. It has no native DirectX support - a rather laughable argument considering MS only offers DX for Windows. You also point out that you've been advised to go with nvidia rather than ati - you know why? Because the ati linux drivers are just crap compared to nvidia's.

If *nix was plain buggy and unreliable why would so much people use it on very expensive hardware?
http://www.top500.org/stats/list/29/os
Just until recently Windows was not even on this list. I dont think I need to mention uptimes and other stuff like security model etc.

The only real point you raise is the poor device support - which is correct and the result of device manufacturers simply not providing drivers for *nix based system let alone specs so free drivers could be written.
If calling *nix plain buggy isn't a flame bait post then I dont know better.

[Bathrone]

Its good that you have enthusiasm for your chosen OS. You are however attempting a straw man argument, which is illogical. My argument is about desktops, where I said "basic fact is *nix is not a viable alternative desktop OS right now."

Honestly, my experience is that *nix is buggy for my use. I fully appreciate that it is widely used in the server world and in my previous posts I have commented on how I have professionally worked on *nix servers.

I have previously listed the sorts of bugs I have encountered when trying various Linux distros. I know first hand that the distros Ive tried has more bugs than Vista. Why dont you pop on over to Ubuntu's launchpad and:

1. Enter the bug section
2. Do an advanced bug search that doesnt include invalid or already fixed bugs
3. See that Ubuntu currently has 32901 current bugs in the launchpad.
4. I fully appreciate some might be duplicates, yet to be classed as invalid and so forth, but the fact remains there is a very significant number of bugs in Ubuntu.........

As too, the reference I made to the Ubuntu fiesty review. The very review where Mark Shuttleworth admitted that Ubuntu isnt ready for the mainstream. There was some bugs mentioned in this review that I have not personally seen - such as loosing sound after returning from sleep.

Honestly, its great that people like yourself and Sharktooth are enthusiastic about Linux but it really does come across as being lunatic fringe stuff where it's somehow deeply engrained in the *nix fanbois that Linux is wonderful regardless of any realities to the contrary and that MS is the evil empire of assimilation that has wrecked the entire computing industry.

As I said before I would much prefer not to pay for Vista but the fact is there is no realistic alternative for my desktop.

It is a great mistruth to suggest that because servers run *nix, the desktop Linux distros are solid. Desktops have to do more things than servers which typically are designed in depth to be secure and have a minimum operational footprint. Desktops are entirely different.

[communist]

I will not comment on this further as your initial comment did indeed sound rather flamey to me. I simply wanted to point out that saying *nix (=! Ubuntu) is plain buggy is wrong!
Anyway PLEASE do not compare me with Sharktooth ;) - I would never go on such a mindless posting spree about how much Vista is teh suck.
I dual boot between Debian/XP and have no Vista-bashing agende as some people have - just check my posting history ;)

[Sharktooth]

communist, you know, im a nazi so we cant be compared by definition:p

[Sharktooth]

i finally installed vista to prove you it EATS memory and its not just caching it...
vista ultimate just out of the box with sidebar disabled, indexing disabled, no background, etc. , everything disabled (even UAC) except aero AND the opera browser opened since IE eats even more ram...
here we go:
http://img108.imageshack.us/img108/8408/therealshitho1.th.png (http://img108.imageshack.us/my.php?image=therealshitho1.png)
as you can see there is 628MB of cache and 1024-628=396 and this result is the RAM eaten up by the system with ONLY aero enabled.
uhm, i think it's a bit too much, and you?

[JohnnyMalaria]

Out of curiosity, is that 32- or 64-bit? I assume you don't stoop so low as to have integrated graphics(?)
I think there's general consensus that whereas 1GB is comfortable for XP, 2GB are really needed for Vista.

But since RAM is s-o-o-o cheap, I don't really see the problem. Old enough to remember when 8MB needed a second mortgage?

[Sharktooth]

32bit .... however no.. its an AGP videocard (gf6600 with 256MB).
the ram is cheap, the hard drives have limited speed... reading and caching all that stuff means the hard drives and RAM should work hard...

[Sharktooth]

... just to add to the pile...
http://www.tech-hounds.com/article29/ArticlesPage1.html

[InorganicMatter]

i finally installed vista to prove you it EATS memory and its not just caching it...
vista ultimate just out of the box with sidebar disabled, indexing disabled, no background, etc. , everything disabled (even UAC) except aero AND the opera browser opened since IE eats even more ram...
here we go:
http://img108.imageshack.us/img108/8408/therealshitho1.th.png (http://img108.imageshack.us/my.php?image=therealshitho1.png)
as you can see there is 628MB of cache and 1024-628=396 and this result is the RAM eaten up by the system with ONLY aero enabled.
uhm, i think it's a bit too much, and you?

The RAM being eaten is a feature called Superfetch, please read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfetch#SuperFetch
That feature is forced on you in Vista - it cannot be turned off. It is good. It is not bad. You bought all that memory, an OS that finally uses it is a good thing. The memory is not "eaten," and will be freed up and used if needed. Yes, Superfetch requires at least 2GB to perform as good as XP, but that much RAM is standard today, and the performance benefits are well worth it.

I know how much you like to bash Microsoft around here on the principle that they are Microsoft, but please at least come to an internet fight prepared.

[Sharktooth]

think whatever you want but vista eats much more RAM than XP. it's proven by the fact it starts swapping on the HD like a mad with software that was running fine on XP.

[Revgen]

The whole reason I'm thinking about getting a 64-bit OS is to personally be able to use 4 GB of RAM to run in Quad-core with my upcoming QX6850 CPU with filters like MCBOB+NNEDI in 4 separate avisynth processes, which take up loads of RAM. Looks like I'll be using WinXP-64 instead.

[reepa]

"That feature is forced on you in Vista - it cannot be turned off. It is good. It is not bad. You bought all that memory, an OS that finally uses it is a good thing. The memory is not "eaten," and will be freed up and used if needed."

I'm pretty sure every Windows since NT fills unused RAM with disk cache. At least my XP reports ~1,2GB free RAM (1,5GB total physical), but ~1GB "System cache" (which includes disk cache?). That isn't counted towards "Total Commit Charge", which hovers around 280MB with Firefox and Winamp open.

Too bad Windows doesn't let you adjust swap behavior. I tried setting my minimum swap to something low like 32 MB, but Windows complained that it had to increase swap size even though Commit Limit never reached above 500 MB (I have 1,5GB of RAM).

Silly anecdote: I tried out the new Lenovo dual-core Vista PCs at our university's computer labs. Solitaire was basically unplayable because of a very low framerate because hardware acceleration wasn't available.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Too bad Windows doesn't let you adjust swap behavior.

Something must be wrong because you can adjust the swap behavior. Are you changing it just after booting (when not too much is running) or when you have a lot of stuff running that won't fit into the smaller amount of memory you are asking for? If the latter, that's why it might complain (just a guess).

You can change the size and also the disk that the swap file is on. You can even have multiple swap files on multiple disks.

And you can even turn it off completely. If you never exceed your physical RAM capacity, the swap file isn't necessary and you can free up space on the hard drive. Typically, the swap file size is similar to the RAM size.

[Schrade]

While I agree it's generally not a worthwhile upgrade there are a few things I would miss if I went back to XP.

The single biggest one is per-application volume control. For me it is really a godsend. I always have Firefox muted, so now I never have to worry about stupid flash ads or background music annoying the hell out of me.
I'm coming in late to the party but if you really must have per application volume control, there's a shareware application out there that does it for ME/2K/XP/2003:

http://www.indievolume.com/

It's $25.00 but it has a 7 day trial.

[reepa]

Something must be wrong because you can adjust the swap behavior.
By swap behavior I mean something like Linux's "swappiness". Windows will swap stuff out of RAM into the paging file even if you have plenty of free RAM:
http://i17.tinypic.com/681wcn7.png

And you can even turn it off completely. If you never exceed your physical RAM capacity, the swap file isn't necessary and you can free up space on the hard drive.
I know, but I'd like to keep a (small, but expandable) paging file available just in case. For example, the antivirus software I have allocates all of the available RAM for a while during boot for some reason, causing Windows to complain about the lack of a swap file. If I set the swap file to something really small (32 MB for example), Windows will expand it anyway because it wants to pre-emptively swap stuff to disk (like in the picture I linked to). That can't be adjusted.

[deets]

i wonder if all these tests were done before the performance and reliability patches were released, or even if they would make any difference :P

[Sharktooth]

A crappy windows remains a crappy windows... as we seen with previous windows version some critical behaviours and flaws cant be corrected with patches, or at least they dont want to do it and advertize the fixed flaws as a new OS features...
so if vienna will eat less RAM than vista they will advertize it in some funny way like: Vienna uses less RAM, so it will help keeping your hard drive cooler resulting in lower computer case temperature and a new level of energy saving...

[squid_80]

And you can even turn it off completely. If you never exceed your physical RAM capacity, the swap file isn't necessary and you can free up space on the hard drive. Typically, the swap file size is similar to the RAM size.

I wouldn't do that. The common way to share memory between processes is to map a section of the swap file to memory... You can guess what happens if you don't have a swap file.

[JohnnyMalaria]

I wouldn't do that. The common way to share memory between processes is to map a section of the swap file to memory... You can guess what happens if you don't have a swap file.

The sharing of memory between processes uses the same API call that is used to share a common file but the sharing doesn't make use of a file. i.e., calling the CreateFileMapping() API function with a handle of 0xFFFFFFFF instructs the OS to use an area of system memory rather than an actual file. Though the shared area is "backed by the operating-system page file", where possible the shared area remains in physical memory. i.e., a paging file isn't required for the mapping to work correctly.

An upcoming new version of one of our programs makes use of this to share DV frames between processes as quickly as possible. I haven't had any issues on a system with no paging file.

There are plenty of folks running Windows happily without a paging file:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000422.html
http://agileprogrammer.com/geeknoise/archive/2005/10/16/8673.aspx

I'm curious to know if you have experienced any problems running without a paging file?