tomanders91 said:does readyboost help a lot with gaming?
Teletraan-82 said:But its only appearing to use so much RAM because of superfetch, not because of a 'high impact problem'
I have 1GB and my usage is constantly 60-70%, yet its quicker than XP.
Matt-Page said:Anyone got an indepth article about how vista utilises RAM? Sounds very interesting and a what would seem, logical step for future O/S's. Do any of the Apple/Linux OS's do this?
Waste not want not!
squiffy said:Vista email no longer supports HTTP, pretty stupid as I have several hotmail accounts, and being that hotmail is MSanyway to get Vista mail to support hotmail email accounts?
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Would you accept that Superfetch is flawed in some ways though?NathanE said:No it isn't. It's complete and utter BS and you are fool to even believe it.
Vista uses a lot of memory because otherwise the memory would be sitting there not doing or helping anything. It's called Superfetch. The idea is to keep RAM usage as high as possible so that almost everything you do on your computer is pre-cached. Memory in use by the Superfetch component of the kernel can be reclaimed instantly so it doesn't affect performance when you load a game or whatever up. The overall result is higher performance.
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=519457SuperFetch has plenty of problems though, real ones that I've identified by monitoring tools. (this is on RTM, of course)
For me SuperFetch (yes, it was that one; I checked the SvcHost's service list and disabled one by one) totally ruined my performance as I used eMule, and I can imagine other apps being affected too. Vista simply thought "OK, so it's evening and he probably wish to run eMule" and started prefetching -- get this -- an unfinished download of several hundred MB's. It just kept reading, reading, making the drive go wild, so I checked what was going on in the Sysinternals File Monitor and I had a lot of read for one and the same file over and over. As soon as I stoppsed the SuperFetch service, my hard drive went completely silent and my computer became far more responsive as it tried to load applications I started and ran.
I wish SuperFetch would be much more configurable and not a black box sitting doing "something it feels would be right" to improve performance. I don't really want to generalize, but it's such typical Microsoft behavior to hide important customization like this from the user in order to dumb it down enough for the masses. File and directory exclusion filters would work wonders with it. Or at least only prefetch executables and DLL's! There's absolutely no reason I'd like to prefetch an unfinished download for faster access because I'm of course not going to run it.
Keep in mind that SuperFetch is based a whole lot on guesswork and statistics.
Hxc said:Isn't that Office 2007, and not vista? Or Outlook express, but why on earth you would ever be using that to manage mail is anyones guess.
Outlook Express doesn't though? Which is what Windows Mail basically is.Rebelius said:I don't use vista mail for one reason alone: it won't minimize to system tray. I don't understand why not, it can't be hard to implement - Outlook does it.
dirtydog said:Outlook Express doesn't though? Which is what Windows Mail basically is.
Yes Superfetch will make mistakes. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of Registry keys to tweak its behaviour though. Exclusion zones are trivial and I'm almost certain Microsoft would have implemented them.dirtydog said:Would you accept that Superfetch is flawed in some ways though?
For example, which I read on another forum recently:-
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=519457
neowin poster said:"Or at least only prefetch executables and DLL's!"
It can't reduce performance? It did for him, until he turned it off.NathanE said:Yes Superfetch will make mistakes. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of Registry keys to tweak its behaviour though. Exclusion zones are trivial and I'm almost certain Microsoft would have implemented them.
Superfetch can't reduce performance though. It can only ever make things better. So what if this guys hard drive was busy for few minutes reading some large files? It doesn't matter on Vista because all I/O is prioritised and Superfetch uses a super-low I/O priority. So basically, if he started doing some other I/O intensive task that would have got priority
He understands it very well. That's his point; he thinks it would work better if it did only include executables and DLLs.This makes me think he doesn't quite understand the purpose of Superfetch. It's not just about pre-caching executable code. It's about pre-caching anything and everything... from Word documents, to media files, even your porn. Everything.
No he didn't like the sound of his hard drive chugging away and incorrectly believed that the old rule of "hmm my hard drive is very busy so it must be slowing everything else down" still applied with Vista. As explained that is no longer the case. It is going to take a while until people even start letting go of that rule.dirtydog said:It can't reduce performance? It did for him, until he turned it off.
He understands it very well. That's his point; he thinks it would work better if it did only include executables and DLLs.
What performance gain is there from pre-fetching a large several hundred MB unfinished download file, which made his computer unresponsive while it was happening and put his HDD under unnecessary strain? I'm failing to see the benefit and obviously so did he.