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To emeowww, undo and anybody else complaining that Windows 7 (or Vista) eats more memory than XP:
Guess what – it doesn’t.
There’s a great analogy going around some forums about Vista/7 caching: when you buy a fridge do always try to leave as empty as possible or do you fill it up as necessary and arrange your items efficiently? That’s exactly what Vista/7 are doing: they are creating a memory cache of programs and other data so they can be accessed faster than reading them from slower storage each time. You can notice that by loading some heavy program twice or more.
In case that memory is needed for a resource-intensive task, caches are either swapped to page file or emptied. So more memory means more cache and having an empty cache is having wasted memory.Here’s a quote from MS:
Quote:A new memory management technology in Windows Vista, Windows SuperFetch, helps keep the computer consistently responsive to your programs by making better use of the computer’s RAM. Windows SuperFetch prioritizes the programs you’re currently using over background tasks and adapts to the way you work by tracking the programs you use most often and preloading these into memory. With SuperFetch, background tasks still run when the computer is idle. However, when the background task is finished, SuperFetch repopulates system memory with the data you were working with before the background task ran. Now, when you return to your desk, your programs will continue to run as efficiently as they did before you left.You can find more on the subject by using your favorite search engine.
So calling Vista/7 a resource hog is at best uneducated.
In a forum designed to educate users of ALL levels, it is never appropriate or helpful to call anyone uneducated. For example, try disabling Superfetch and Indexing sometime, reboot, and see how much nicer Vista runs for certain applications (games for instance). It invalidates your MS-hyped general argument.
scientist,
What’s the point in using a newer OS and disabling it’s features? I’ve tried disabling caching on Vista and it didn’t do any good on my work PC for heavyweight development apps. So it’s probably there for a good reason. And both Vista and 7 run really well on my NC 10 almost out of the box.
Pogi, I’m on 1GB at the moment so that explains why yours shows 20% usage 🙂
I suppose you don’t understand my point rev3nant – I bought and use my netbook for the purposes of it being a netbook – i.e. MS Office, Firefox.
I don’t use it for ‘hardcore’ apps which involve lots of loading/disk activity etc. Yes, 7 has lots of enhancements aimed at improving battery life, processor and memory usage etc, but in practical terms, these make little difference for my purposes of computing.
My major quirks were its overall usability as per last post. So overall, I see little justification to spend extra money on an OS that requires another learning curve, uses more resources, and doesn’t necessarily improve my daily computing experience. This is the same reason why I’m still using XP on my desktop as well.
And that is why I am hoping for the final version 7 to be at the same or better than XP.
Please dont be rude by calling people uneducated, we were all n00bs once. 😉
Second, I agree that Windows superfetch does improve performance on Windows 7 for most basic apps, which is the reason we all bought these things anyway. Anyone who actually bought one of these expecting to pay the latest and greatest video games is out of their mind. (Though Warcraft 3 runs like a charm 🙂 albeit being 800×600)
Here’s my two cents on the matter. For me Windows 7 runs very well, though I have 2 gigs of ram. As someone who’s been running Windows since 2.0 I can say that this OS has had the shortest learning curve of any previous windows OS. Everything seems intutive, the OS so far has been nothing but smooth, and everything seems to be running nice and quickly.
I’m seeing about 30% of my memory being used at startup, but that’s including AVG and a few other tools. Firefox loads up nice and quickly (within 5 seconds on first load) and everything else is also fairly speedy. As far as usability is concerned, I love the new aero snap features, and the new taskbar is really growing on me. (The inline progress meters are awesome) Anyways, for now, it’s free so stick with it for a bit and see if you like it. Otherwise, XP’ll be around to save you. =P
Good luck, and happy surfing.
Oh and another thing, I still cant seem to get the battery manager to run on startup without disabling UAC completely. I’ve been fiddling around with some registry settings and I’ll keep everyone updated.
[quote1231970140=emeowww]And that is why I am hoping for the final version 7 to be at the same or better than XP.[/quote1231970140]
Personally i believe W7 offers a far better OS experience than any of the previous windows OS’s. If you have a play with it and check out the tips you’ll see that no t only does it support a lot more of most people requirements out of the box but you can do some cool intuitive things with it. Its a very flexible OS imo and i shall continue to use it on my sammy until the final release comes out. Then i’ll go an purchase it for both my sammy and desktop.
Regarding memory, whats the point of having loads of RAM if you ain’t gonna use it? I would prefer my computer to run faster on the whole sacrificing some used memory….its there to be used and now W7 can utilise this pool of memory better then far be it for me to complain (and i’ve only got 1Gb) and have not seen any problems as yet. Yes, i don’t do so much heavy stuff on the sammy but i’ve still got a lot of apps installed and haven’t seen any ill effect as yet. Lots of testing to be done and i’m sure someone will break it as it is windows after all. 😉
Randomocity – don’t bother with the battery manager… There is really very little it does that the built in controls don’t anyway. Just select a profile and go into advanced options and you can change a whole mess of options 🙂
Just wondering what kind of battery life users are seeing under Windows 7.
I installed BatteryBar yesterday and it started off with only 4 hours estimated full lifetime (the battery was about 55% charged). I disabled all bluetooth hardware in device manager and a couple of seemingly unnecessary services, and it improved to between 5 and 5:30 hours.
I’ve just completed a full charge and the estimate is now 5:40. Is anyone getting better than this and, if so, could you share any tips and tricks? 🙂
BTW, I get about an hour more under XP.
Im also wondering about the battery life. I really like ubuntu but switched back because the battery life was lacking. How is Windows 7 compared to XP?
Anyone else find the new “Devices and Printers” control panel flaky? It shows the devices sometimes and sometimes doesn’t or sometimes some devices are missing while others are there, etc.
[quote1232007000=mjleelaw]
Anyone else find the new “Devices and Printers” control panel flaky? It shows the devices sometimes and sometimes doesn’t or sometimes some devices are missing while others are there, etc.
[/quote1232007000]it is only a beta mind.
I personally haven’t noticed problems.
as for battery life, on the kind of settings I use which is mid-brightness, 3/4 volume, seem to be about 5/6 hours. that is with the wlan switched off when i don’t need it.[quote1232014299=rev3nant]
scientist,What’s the point in using a newer OS and disabling it’s features? I’ve tried disabling caching on Vista and it didn’t do any good on my work PC for heavyweight development apps. So it’s probably there for a good reason. And both Vista and 7 run really well on my NC 10 almost out of the box.
[/quote1232014299]Well, sorry, but Caching is not the same as Prefetch or Indexing. And I’ve often disabled “features” in new versions of Windows when they prove not be be very efficient. You have to remember that MS designs their OSs mainly for corporate, centrally administered networked office environments – that’s just not my world.
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