Kind of an irritating issue.....

[rotary]

I haven't used Vista yet, but I've heard it's a ram hog. Assuming ctrl alt del functions the same in Vista as it does in XP, check your ram usage to see if it's approaching 1GB. Your system may be accessing virtual memory on the hardrive. If that's the case, try killing some programs.

 

[Matt1809]

First of all dont turn off indexing, you wont be able to search your computer quickly and its going to be a pain, especially because the new start menu was designed to be used with search.

Second, vista doesnt encrypt anything you dont tell it to. Its not encrpyting everything as stated before, this is due to a misunderstanding of Vista's contentent protection system that was added for support with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, it doesnt run or take up any space unless your using those two formats that have the content protection enabled.

Second, let Vista do its job. It does ALOT more in terms of memory management then XP, especially on a new install. The best thing you can let it do when you get it is just let it sit for a while while it works itself out.

Vista looks at how you use your computer, it detects what programs you use the most and when. Based on that information, it tires to preload that data into ram before you use it, to make launching applications faster. You may see your hard drive be used more as a result, but all of this is put on a low hd priority, meaning requests from applications your using get loaded first. Actually, the more RAM you have, the more its going to use your harddrive, as Vista tries to fill up all your empty ram space, of course when you need that space the data gets thrown out.

You can actually watch this happen, if you press Ctrl + Shift + Esc you will pull up the task manager, on the performance tab one of the stats talks about physical memory. It displays three numbers, Physical, Chached, Free. When you first log on, or after closing a big program, you can see the free ram decrease as the chached memory increases, and at the same time your hard drive will be active, as its loading the data.

So go back and turn indexing on, and let vista do its thing. Also, you will see some active HD usage around 2-3 am on Wednesday, this is when Vista's disk defragmenter runs automatically in the background, I also suggest you let it run. And again, all this runs on a low hard drive priority, so it shouldnt effect you that much.

 

[Matt1809]

Since you have 1 GB RAM, you can load the entire OS, a full suite of office applications, several games, dozens of application programs, system tools, a disk partitioner, several media players, several browsers, several CD/DVD burner programs, and a few thousand other things all into RAM simultaneously.

No, no you cant. I have used knoppix and its slow as balls compaired to an installed OS. Seek times are much slower on DVD drives, plus your computer has to decompress all the files stored on their to actually run the damn thing. Plus it didnt detect my network card, and the STD distro kept kernal panicing.

Warning - One of the touted features of Vista is its Search feature, messing with this will hinder this ability.

Whoops, my bad, I missed that.

 

[Matt1809]

A CD-ROM cannot accomodate more than 1 GB of data, more typically 800 to 900 MB. Therefore, it is possible to load the entire distribution and all apps from the CD into 1 GB RAM simultaneously. Many Linux distros offer this capability. It is almost humorous how fast the system runs when you do this.

Right, and after 80% of your ram has been taken up by programs which arnt even running, what exactly, do you do then? Run one application at a time?

 

[mike_n_herrin]

assuming you have the Vista install disk so you can reinstall it later if you want, you could go out and buy XP and reformat your new hard drive and install XP if you don't want to run Vista or a Linux distribution.

 

[Matt1809]

So the 800 MB is the OS plus all those apps, with room to spare!
QUOTE]
Perhaps your misunderstanding me. I know its loading everything into memory, but that is the problem. If I load 800mb worth of (compressed, all Knoppix apps are compressed and are decompressed when they need to be run) then I only have 200 mb of actual RAM left for my computer to use. So yea, you can load everything into memory, but your not actually able to run all of them at once.

Go boot up knoppix using the toram paramater, then go boot up open office and gimp and firefox, and I bet on a one gig machine your going to start getting low memory errors. 200 megs for application & kernal use is less then most people had in 2000.

 

[Matt1809]

Think about that, Matt. 200 MB is an additional 25% more address space than the 800 MB you started with! 128 MB alone is more than enough to run most OSs from the hard drive (including, I believe, Win XP). 200 MB is an enormous amount of memory for the OS to work with.

What are you talking about? That 800mb cannot be addressed (or used as ram) by the system, as that is where your hard drive (ramdisk) is stored. Thus you only have 200mb to use as actual ram, which is nothing. Sure, you can boot XP with 128mb, but that doesn mean XP needs only 128 mb, which is why there is virtual memory, which of course knoppix cant use because it doesnt use the hard disk. I bet if you do a clean boot of xp with 128mb of ram your going to be using at least 300 mb of swap space, and yea it will work, but it will be slow as crap.

And again, 200 is nothing for storing the live OS data and application. Yeah, you can do open office, but you sure as heck cant play WoW, or edit large raw images while running eclipse. Its a ridiculious suggestion to tell someone to go use knoppix as their main os.

And I bet you've never loaded MS Office and opened a 12 page document (BOTH!) in a single second, have you?

Er, actually I can. Windows vista preloads all commonly used applications into ram, plus with ready boost the thing flies. Now all I need is a ready drive and I can boot up in less then 10 seconds.

Most people in 2000 had 64 or 128 MB machines!

I had at least 128 in 1998, I suspect 256 was common by 2000.

I get "low memory" warnings on that computer almost from the time I boot up (and that's with only one or two apps loaded!).

Thats probably because windows tries to allocate 1.5 times the amount of ram you have for swap space, which it cant on a ramdisk, thus it takes up as much as it can leaving you with very little.

 

[Matt1809]

You're right, Matt, 200 MB is not much memory for Windows. For every other OS on Earth, though, that's an enormous amount of memory with which to work.

OSX:
At least 256MB of physical RAM
http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.html

Ubuntu:
The current Ubuntu LTS release 6.06 requires 256 megabytes of RAM

It amazes me that MS doesn't understand what is going on in the American workplace. But that is why Vista is not selling well. We figure we'll eventually be forced to adopt Vista, but we're hoping to put off our first purchase of Vista for another five years.

Uh, if your still using Windows 95, your company is seriously behind the times. Most companies arnt like yours, hence why XPs penetration is so large when using web metrics.

But the point is, your computer is probably going to the drive a lot because Vista isn't happy with just 1 GB RAM.

Again, before you go saying something like that, perhaps you should read my first post. Vista is happy, and the more RAM you add the more its going to use the disk.