Vista Hints, Tips

[Begbie]

Yeah I suppose its not the best option if you alt+tab a lot. Havent tested it though.

[Drake]

[QUOTE]
Physical memory useage is massive - around 1.5Gb at idle.
[QUOTE]

Thats an urban myth. Vista does not use 1.5 Gb ram when idle. (even though your task manager says so)

Proof: I have 2Gb ram and Vista. I load PR maps in about 10 sec. In vB2 and Red Orchestra there usually only 1 or 2 other players that loads as fast as me on a full 64 player server..... Would that be possible with only 0,5 Gb of free ram?????

[Masaq]

Drake old chap, it's not a myth. It's Vista's "Superfetch" and Indexing Services in this case.

Superfetch runs under the svchost.exe process. It pre-loads files into RAM that Vista thinks you're likely to use based on your historical useage patterns.

Indexing does what it did in XP, only even more thoroughly - keeping a list of the files on your PC and where they're kept, so you can find them again easily.

Both of them use a whacking great amount of RAM. Killing Indexing off dropped my memory useage by about 200Mb (5%), and there's a similar amount being used by Superfetch at present.

The proof you supplied is (unless you've disabled those services?) proof that Vista isn't as stupid as most people think - when you start loading up Red Orchestra or PR, it's halting the memory-intensive applications it's running in the background, or at any rate, slowing them down. You can actually see this with the indexing service if you have it turned on - going to the Indexing section in Control Panel, it'll tell you when it's throttling back on Indexing because you're actively using the computer. When it senses the machine's at idle, it wracks the process back up.

All I can say is, I've got the 64-bit version and I'm using 4 full gigs of PC6400 memory, and I'm bloody glad I am!

[Bamboo]

@[R-MOD]Masaq
I would +1 rep you if I could man.
Thanks for helping point that out to people.

[Drake]

Thx for clearing that up Masaq. But I will still call it an urban myth cause ppl seem to think that Vista uses 1.5 Gb ram all the time....

I have 2 gigs of cheap 5400 ram and load faster than anyone. (maybe my 10K rpm raptor disk has something to do with it???) I dont see why I should buy 4 Gb of expensive ram....

Edit: I dont multitask much, so it seems like wasted money.

[Masaq]

*Bow* Thanks

In all honesty though I didn't know much about what Vista gets up to in the background until a few weeks ago when I first started contemplating making the upgrade; it's a minor miracle what google can find for you.


For anyone who's interested in looking at what services and processes are doing what on their system:

Load up the Command Prompt.

tasklist /svc /FI "PID eq ####"
ENTER

And hit Enter. #### is the PID of whatever process you're interested in; PIDs are shown in TaskManager and the Resource Monitor. The quotes are necessary, leave them in.

It'll return the PID, the process name and what services are running through that process - running it on a copy of svchost.exe for example will return whatever Windows Services are running in it, and will go some way (often) to explaining why that particular instance of svchost is using so many resources.


Or, if you're a graphical man, righ-click on the process in TaskMan and select "Go to services..." ... but that's cheating

Originally Posted by Drake

Thx for clearing that up Masaq. But I will still call it an urban myth cause ppl seem to think that Vista uses 1.5 Gb ram all the time....

I have 2 gigs of cheap 5400 ram and load faster than anyone. (maybe my 10K rpm raptor disk has something to do with it???) I dont see why I should buy 4 Gb of expensive ram....

Edit: I dont multitask much, so it seems like wasted money.

It's not so much a myth as being unaware of what the OS is actually doing in the background. Vista gets a lot of flak for doing all this stuff in the background without most users being aware of it - in fairness though most modern systems have a lot of slack power they're not using most of the time (Gaming or video editing being about the one time most of us will ever really stress our machines), so it's hardly a big deal, as your system shows.

And yeah, your fast drive will almost certainly have a fair deal to do with it - when large maps and sounds are being loaded into memory for the first time (such as when loading a map for the first time having just started PR), they'll be placed into the RAM that little bit faster than 7,200rpm users.

[Bamboo]

I also like using ProcessExplorer Process Explorer

It blows the vista task manager out of the water

Also @Drake
You will notice a difference moving to 4 gigs in both normal tasks and PR, and considering you can find tons of fast 2 gig kits for $30, why not upgrade.
Like said above, Vista will adjust depending on how much ram you have, and plays ok with 2 gigs (I ran with 2 gigs the first few weeks after I built), but noticed a much smoother system as soon as I dropped in the other 2 gigs. Everything loads faster, especially commonly used programs.

[krisfx]

I doubt it, vista would have to constantly keep swapping over, however whilst gaming you could just manually change to vista basic so you can still alt tab out

[Brummy]

Enable the built-in administrator account. It gives a lot of advantages:

1. No more annoyances such as Run as Administrator, etc. (It automatically does that)
2. Auto-UAC off (not that much of a deal.. but)
3. More privileges

Of course it does demand common PC use sense and a bit more knowledge

[Masaq]

Just set my profile to administrator and smacked a whopping great password on the account; works fine for me lol.