Vista performance

[claidheamhmor]

Give Vista 4GB of RAM and it's a lot quicker. Not as quick as XP, but quicker. There is one interesting improvement to Vista though: disk caching. The other night, I was cleaning up my hard drives; I was copying 60GB from one drive to another, while at the same time I was running 4 separate delete processes, each of several gigabytes, on the drivers. (I was using the fantastic file management app, Total Commander, to do this, BTW). As you can imagine, the drives were churning away, running at 100% utilisation. Then I noticed that Total Commander's process was using almost a gigabyte of RAM...and that despite all the disk activity, the desktop and running apps seemed perfectly responsive. I loaded GuildWars, and that was completely playable; it didn't seem like it was being impacted by all the activity.

Certainly seems like Microsoft radically improved disk-handling techniques (if you have enough RAM, at least).

Comments

[salambander.livejournal.com]

Pfft. The title of this entry is such an oxymoron.

[claidheamhmor]

Tee hee. Methinks you may have a point there. (Especially since I didn't mention that the copy and deletes took bloody forever. The system was very responsive...but it took forever to get them done.)

[openmindedmale.livejournal.com]

Was Vista SP1 installed? I know that the way caching is done was one of the changes made.

Me, I'll wait until Windows 7 before upgrading I think. Windows XP with the set of utilities I add to it works very well for me.

[claidheamhmor]

Yep, SP1 installed.

As for upgrading- I can't really think of any compelling reasons to want to upgrade to Vista anyway.

[openmindedmale.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Though sometime I hope to get my hands on Windows Server 2008 and see if some of the rumors I've heard are true. (about, if trimmed properly, it's a MUCH better OS than Vista, and a decent successor to XP)

[musicalchaos.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Now if only I could afford that extra two gigs of ram without breaking my bank. Damned laptop memory.

[claidheamhmor]

Ooh, laptop memory...that's somewhat more expensive. Around here, desktop RAM, DDR2-800, is a pretty reasonable $100 for 4GB (for me, at least).

[musicalchaos.livejournal.com]

*nods* Yeah, I'm running 667 DDR2 SDRAM, 4 gigs will run anywhere from 100-200 depending on where I get it from and what brand. I'm rather loathe to order it online, though, on account of being worried about return policies if it turns out to be the wrong type.

[openmindedmale.livejournal.com]

I paid US$160 for 8 GB of DDR2-800 earlier this month, from Newegg. RAM is cheap these days, and I've never had problems with that vendor.

[musicalchaos.livejournal.com]

Laptop or Desktop, though? I usually find laptop to have a mark-up of at least 50% over the equivalent desktop variety.

[openmindedmale.livejournal.com]

Oh, true.. desktop.

Anyway, even doubled it's still not expensive, not when one remembers how RAM prices used to be.

Now what I really want is superfast AND cheap SSD drives.. they're coming, but they're a few years off yet.

[musicalchaos.livejournal.com]

Well, not horribly expensive, but there's one more contributing factor. I'm a broke college student. *chuckles*

[openmindedmale.livejournal.com]

Heh, I know what that's like :)

[windrider-09.livejournal.com]

Not bad at all