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Follow us on FacebookBehind the Windows 7 memory usage scaremongering
@ 2010/02/19It was claimed yesterday that Windows 7 machines are "alarmingly low" on memory, with 86 percent of Windows 7 machines using 90-95 percent of their physical memory. Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software, a company developing performance monitoring software, cited data from his company's XPnet community. Community members use a freely downloadable tool that periodically uploads performance data to the XPnet servers, and it's this data, from a few tens of thousands of computers, that was used to justify the claim.
Having used Windows 7 in one form or another for more than a year, this struck me as a little surprising. The laptop I use most of the time is no powerhouse—the 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor is positively anemic, and the 64GB SSD cramped—but excessive memory usage (with all the consequent performance problems caused by excessive paging) has never been one of them. Sure, the laptop has a full 4GB of RAM, and since I'm using 64-bit Windows, all of that 4GB is available to the OS, but even under heavy usage, memory just hasn't been a problem.
Having used Windows 7 in one form or another for more than a year, this struck me as a little surprising. The laptop I use most of the time is no powerhouse—the 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor is positively anemic, and the 64GB SSD cramped—but excessive memory usage (with all the consequent performance problems caused by excessive paging) has never been one of them. Sure, the laptop has a full 4GB of RAM, and since I'm using 64-bit Windows, all of that 4GB is available to the OS, but even under heavy usage, memory just hasn't been a problem.
