Vista Memory Dynamics

There is a lot of discussion on Vista and memory here. I just expanded my memory on my desktop and have some observations. I have 32 bit Vista Ultimate and just went from 2 gigs to four, knowing about the 32 bit applications. Effectively, I've gone from 2 to three gigabyes. I run a performance monitor all the time and what I've seen is very interesting.

When I ran my system with 2 gigabytes, about 2/3 to 3/4 of that memory was in use with relatively high usuage of my 700 megabyte paging file.

So I've increased my effective memory by fifty percent. What do i now see?

About 2/3 to 3/4 of that memory was is use BUT my paging file usage is almost zero. Vista is able to keep content in memory. It's memory utilization algorithms are pretty well tuned. It's wants to use about 3/4 of available memory. It will surrender the memory if needed. It's not greedy but there is a lot of intelligence to a system these days.

This was a cleanly installed system but even though I am conservation with what I download a system acquires bloatware after a while. Photoshop, the Java Engine, Vista, Adobe Reader and real player at a minimum all have memory resident update detectors to down updates that seem to yield no functional improvements at all.

Vista has taken a lot of bad raps from people who just do not understand it.

 

Just in case people get confused, I assume you meant to write 2 gigabytes - not 3?

 

Thank you, you're right ! It's been a hard day for pagan's