m.oreilly, on Feb 21 2008, 11:16 PM, said:
never did see such a thing. you ain't got that there windowblinds installed, have you?
Sorry people. I should really research these things before posting.
Apparently it's completely normal for you to not have any physical RAM not being either used or cached as Vista's "Superfetch" feature loads your most used programs and similar crap into unused RAM in order to speed up programs opening and what not.
Quote
"Vista is trying its darndest to pre-emptively populate every byte of system memory with what it thinks I might need next. It's running a low-priority background task that harvests previously accessed data from the disk and plops it into unused system memory. They even have a fancy marketing name for it: Superfetch. Vista treats system memory like a cache much more aggressively and effectively than any other version of Windows. As alluded to in the above lunch anecdote-- and as you can see from the Task Manager screenshot above-- Windows XP has no qualms whatsoever about leaving upwards of a gigabyte of system memory empty. From a caching perspective, this is unfathomable. Vista tries its damndest to fill that empty system memory cache as soon as it can."
However:
Quote
Although I am a total believer in the system-memory-as-cache religion, SuperFetch can still have some undesirable side effects. I first noticed that something was up when I fired up Battlefield 2 under Vista and joined a multiplayer game. Battlefield 2 is something of a memory hog; the game regularly uses a gigabyte of memory on large 64-player multiplayer maps. During the first few minutes of gameplay, I noticed that the system was a little sluggish, and the drive was running constantly. This was very unusual and totally unlike the behavior under Windows XP. Once the map is loaded and you join the game, the entire game is in memory. What could possibly be loading from disk at that point? Well, SuperFetch saw a ton of memory freed to make room for the game, and dutifully went about filling the leftover free memory on a low-priority background disk thread. Normally, this would be no big deal, but even a low-priority background disk thread is pretty noticeable when you're playing a twitch shooter online with 63 other people at a resolution of 1600x1200
So...I know some of you guys use Vister to game on...is there a way around this? Do you just disable SuperFetch altogether or?
On edit: I guess SuperFetch also doesn't explain why I'm sitting at 1gb RAM used at idle...
dwm.exe aka aero glass is taking 100mb at idle
svchost.exe is taking 100mb at idle
Grrr.
Edited by eniparadoxgma, 22 February 2008 - 04:29 AM.