Finally the silence is broken, a new episode is here! Thom was not available again this week, OSnews reader Mike Ferland takes his place and we discuss Windows 7 and The Perfect OS (no relation).
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Member since:2007-09-22
Member since:2009-11-05
Member since:2005-11-16
Hi,
I've got the opposite problem. I've got 12 GiB of RAM, and when I type "free" (after running for 8 days) it says that 9.5 GiB of that RAM isn't being used for disk caches or anything else that could improve performance; and is therefore wasted.
After running for long enough a very good OS should say "almost no RAM free" to let you know that the OS is doing everything it can.
-Brendan
Member since:2009-11-05
Member since:2006-01-02
1GB is more than enough, until you run bloated apps. I like some bloated apps. Most people use bloated apps, whether they like them or not 
. My every day applications include OOo/KOffice, Firefox, the devil that is Flash, etc..
It actually works impressively well on my P3 1.13, 384MB RAM, Thinkpad.
Minimum requirements ain't what they used to be.
The problem with Vista was that it was very hard to get it scaling down in base resources. 7 is far more balanced, in that regard.
Edited 2009-11-11 04:54 UTC
Member since:
2007-09-22
I still don't understand why you'd need 2GB of memory just to run an operating system and 'every day'-applications. This is not just an OEM-problem.
EDIT: Maybe I should clarify, on my Ubuntu 64-bit machine I have 4GB of RAM, but when I open a terminal and type free it says, it uses 1GB. About 500MB for kernel and userspace and about 500MB for filesystem-cache, of which part is probably memory-mapped-files which were put their by readahead. Just like Vista does.
So where does it all go ?
Edited 2009-11-10 10:00 UTC