Windows Vista is growing into more and more PCs and recently I see that they don’t sell a computer with XP anymore. You might think I am one of those guys who resists against change, but I still can’t see the benefit of Vista but have easily seen its disadvantages.

I bought a computer for a relative of mine. She uses the computer mainly for Internet browsing and therefore doesn’t use a computer to its maximum extend. The computer came with Vista and since the first day you could easily see that the performance of the computer was not better than their old computer, a Pentium III 900MHz processor with 512M RAM.

In Vista everything is done a bit differently, so you have to adapt yourself to many new changes. You can’t even shut down the computer and have to exercise for a while. These things pass after a couple of times of trying, but it doesn’t end there. Many old hardware don’t work properly if transferred in the new computer. Their old computer had a SMC wireless network adapter card. When I put it in the new computer the connection was very slow. There was no Vista support for the old card and therefore I was forced to buy them a new LinkSys USB wireless adapter and download the Vista driver for it, and now the network speed is great. But still the computer speed is not even as fast as a slower version of the same CPU that runs on XP.

Everyone I talked to told me that Vista is a RAM eater! I can see what they mean especially when I experience such a slow performance. At the beginning I felt that so much graphical effects might also degrade the performance.

But how does Vista handle the memory, RAM? As I said everything is a bit different in Vista. Well I can say it is way different when it comes to memory handling. What I describe here comes from my experience with Vista, and not from a research on how it actually works.

When you press Alt-Ctrl-Del and enter the Computer Performance window you will have a hard time understanding what is the meaning of the numbers you see as they are different than what you have seen in previous Windows. I still don’t understand them all, but at least I know when it says “Free”, it means the free memory, or I hope it is what I think! This new computer has 512M of RAM. I realized that the number beside “Free” was zero. Therefore I assumed that the slow performance returned to the lack of memory. I tried to release some of the memory but I was unsuccessful. So I decided to buy 1G of extra RAM.

I did that and here comes the funny part. First I turned the computer on and went into the Computer Performance window. Here the numbers don’t add up for the total memory and I guess I’m missing something. But anyway I see that now there is about 700M free memory which makes me happy. I try the speed and now it is significantly better. I keep monitoring the memory and I see that the free memory drops to 500M, 200M and finally zero!! Oh dear God why is this happening to me?! I tried the performance again and it is still pretty good. So what does it mean?

Then I suddenly reached the enlightenment! I believe that they changed the memory handling mechanism for Vista. What they do is simply that they put whatever you use into the RAM and fill it up completely. This way when you need to start a program, if it is already in the RAM it takes a very short while for it start and that’s good. But if it is not already there, it takes a longer time for it to first load into the memory, and from that point forward if you close and open that program it will take much less time for it to start.This conclusion was based on what I saw:

• When the computer had only 512M of RAM, when I restarted the computer the speed was very slow, but it started to pick up speed after a while of using the computer. It showed that Vista had been loading the programs I was using into the RAM to speed up its responses to my specific needs.
• When I upgraded the memory to 1.5G I started Microsoft Words which took a bit long. I closed and re-opened it and I realized that it took a fraction of that time.

The way it was done in older Windows was that a program would load into the RAM when it was requested, and would be removed from the RAM as soon as it was closed. I can see the advantage of Vista here as more requests are responded to with a faster speed. But I see some disadvantages too:

• When you start your computer from a shutdown, Vista tries to fill up your RAM which takes a long time of hard-drive usage and slower speed period.
• If you want to use a program that takes a lot of memory, it starts releasing the memory to accommodate the new data that could take a longer time than if there was nothing in the memory.

Anyway you may never want to shutdown your computer again as Vista will perform faster when used longer. Just use hibernate or standby modes. I still can’t see why they went with the new method of handling the memory, but who knows, maybe there is a real benefit to it! In the mean-while, I salute to the older versions of Windows!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Knowledge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.