Different Memory allocation on Vista?

I have been told that Vista uses different memory allocation than XP; that when you go to task manager and view the amount of ram you currently use, it is all taken up.

How is this an improvement over the method XP used? Is all of your ram TRULY all being used, or just being flagged as all being used?

 

Well, what is the point in having unused memory? It's unused, it's wasted.
Of course, we also want to be able to handle memory allocation requests as fast as possible, which is why you *usually* want to keep some memory free.

But what really matters isn't whether the memory is free (unused), but simply whether it can be safely "taken over" if there suddenly is a memory request.

So what Vista does is, it loads frequently used programs and data into RAM, so that *if* you should need it, it's there. But it's not actually in use, so if a program needs to allocate memory, it can safely overwrite some of this. Best of both worlds, really. You have lots of memory available for handling memory allocation requests, but until that happens, you might as well use it as a cache for what you think the user might need next.

 

Yes, I agree! Also consider that Vista will adapt to the pattern of program usage from the user, so that if you always open Outlook on MWF, those are the days that Vista will superfetch it into memory upon start up. Really smart stuff, and winrot has been eliminated as far as I can tell.

 

Is this why its battery consumption is reported to be higher than XP on same machines?

 

You mean it could potentially access the HDD more than you would in XP, thus end up draining the battery quicker? Interesting, do you have a link?

 

No, I meant the opposite, since data is already in RAM, it may need *fewer* harddrive accesses.

The RAM is basically always on, so it doesn't really cost any extra power to make sure it's full.
But avoiding harddrive accesses can in theory lead to significant power savings. So no, that's not why XP is nicer on the battery.

 

Yes, the keyword is "may". Most of the time, Vista is on the money predicting program usage given that most PC users have a certain routine in terms of applications they run at home. However, if they were to change this routine while on battery or on the road, then you would end up with a lot of hard drive access fetching programs that would not be used under those circumstances. That's why I asked for links, although my inquiry was meant for skagen. It would be interesting to see if Vista recognizes behavior patterns based on power schemes as well as dates and times.