Months go, I reviewed Windows Vista, and concluded: "All in all, I am impressed by Windows Vista [...]. Windows Vista is better than XP, and definitely more than just an improved look as many say." After 5 months of usage, it is time to put that statement into perspective.
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Member since:2006-05-09
Yeap, I know I am exagerating about the memory usage, but I do not see huge benefits on SuperFetch (TM); all your memory is allocated with applications the system thinks you are going to use some time on this session [I do not know the MS algorithm to determine what applications should be loaded; but the OS cannot be never totally sure that you are going to use those applications]; the process of loading applications into RAM consumes processor resources and makes access to the disk; turning your computer slower while this occurs (maybe "uselessly" if the applications are never going to be used on this session).
Anyway, if I need to launch another application into my system, the preloaded applications will be unloaded from the RAM [again, unnecessary memory deallocation and CPU consumption].
Member since:2005-07-09
Member since:2005-10-17
Member since:2006-01-02
I think you have some misconceptions here... the OS has a priority scheme for both disk IO operations and memory pages. The pages that are loaded speculatively by SuperFetch are given the lowest priority when they are loaded, so they're the first to go if someone else really needs the memory more. Disk IO is also priorities, so if someone else wants to touch the disk, they get to go before SuperFetch, so the boot-time disk activity shouldn't make a difference.
Superfetch is not allocating and deallocating memory. This isn't like malloc() in C. Instead it's moving moving "pages" (4KB chunks) of data from the disk to the physical memory. Most of these pages are read-only (since they come from EXEs and DLLs), so dropping (you could conceptually think of this as "deallocating") pages costs nothing... you just overwrite the memory with the new page of data because the old page has not changed since it was read from disk. Unaccessed superfetched pages are dropped before any other pages on the system, so you really lose nothing from this optimization except for the memory and resources superfetch itself takes to maintain and run its fetch scenarios.
Superfetch is not preloading. It's totally different from the OOo preloader or anything else like that. It is actually a cache-warming system that's pretty advanced. If you'd like more info, look up Russinovich's article about it.
Member since:
2005-07-09
I think you are pretty off the mark when you say the 2 gig ram for my use. Vista does not use it for itself but rather for apps and its all memory resident. Supre Prefetch. Bottomline, Vista out of box is bloated. If you use vLite and tweak it as speedyvista website suggest it can work extremely well. It is definitely an ugprade to XP however I wont use it till SP1. Then I will definitely switch.