Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 14th Aug 2007 17:55 UTC, submitted by tudyparghel
"As we saw in part 1 of this series, large applications and games under Windows are getting incredibly close to hitting the 2GB barrier, the amount of virtual address space a traditional Win32 (32-bit) application can access. Once applications begin to hit these barriers, many of them will start acting up and/or crashing in unpredictable ways which makes resolving the problem even harder. Furthermore, as we saw in part 2, games are consuming greater amounts of address space under Windows Vista than Windows XP. This makes Vista less suitable for use with games when at the same time it will be the version of Windows that will see the computing industry through the transition to 64-bit operating systems becoming the new standard. Microsoft knew about the problem, but up until now we were unable to get further details on what was going on and why. As of today that has changed."
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Member since:
2005-07-20
Remember a couple of things here:
First, when XP was released Windows 2000 was only at SP2, which used far less memory than SP4 does.
Second, Windows 2000 uses around 64-160MB of memory on a fresh install. I am not talking "active memory", I'm talking about total memory usage, page file included.
Now, when I do a fresh install of Windows XP SP2 or Windows 2003, I'm lucky to have total memory usage be less than 400MB. No, really. That's still over twice as much. That's over four times as much in many cases.
Now, if I strip most of the useless crud out of Windows 2000, I can make it run on a computer with 16MB of memory. It will use a total of 48MB of memory, all used pages accounted for.
Meanwhile removing every possible thing from XP that doesn't kill program/hardware compatibility still leaves the system using around 160MB of address space. Sacrificing several functions like network browsing, printer support, etc, you can get it down to around 128MB, but it's a pain.
And it's not just turning off services to get it that low, you have to actually manually rip those parts of windows out of the Operating system so that they can't be used any longer.
Best case scenario, Windows XP uses 2.5x the memory of Windows 2000. Average computer it will be 3-4x memory usage. Meanwhile, I haven't seen anything that only works in XP. Yes, some people make "XP only" games, but you can change that using Orca and the programs, surprisingly enough, still work just fine in Windows 2000.
I actually have quite a few things that work in 2000 but won't run in XP...
The problem that people have with Vista is that it tends to leave crap in active memory that XP would have paged out. It really only uses about 1.5x the overall memory of a full XP install, they just have bad memory management so it looks worse. (note: I haven't used Vista from release onward, I'm going by RC1 usage).
google_ninja wrote:
"Well, 2k ran in about 200 megs of ram, xp ran in about 400."
where do you get these numbers from? they are grossly inflated.
Most likely he got them from, I dunno, the little spot in the task manager that tells you the memory usage. RAM usage and memory usage are two completely different things.
Check out your task manager, under performance: Total Commit Charge is what you are looking for.
Last time I installed 2000, after tweaking, it was at 80MB usage just sitting there (drivers, etc, all set up.) I just checkout out my XP box, it registers about 412MB usage... just sitting there.
Vista, if memory serves, used around 700-800MB... which is a far smaller jump... 175-200% usage, vs 515%...
Edited 2007-08-15 00:14 UTC