Windows Vista for Dummies: Where did all my RAM go?
Comments (2) Foreword: Read this article if you are currently in the following situation
- You have 1GB of RAM in your computer and had installed Vista on it. A few days later, you noticed that Vista keep reporting a close to 70% usage of RAM. You immediately switch to hysterical mode and start swearing that Vista is a bloat-warez.
- You have added 4GB of RAM to your computer (making a total of 4GB because you have 0GB to start with), and prefer/insist to see as much of the 4GB RAM empty and unused all the time. (Which makes me wonder why do you waste your money buying 4GB of RAM in the first place when you don’t intend to have it utilized.)
- You just wouldn’t care but want to know the technology behind it
First of all, it is important for you to stop treating the RAM as just a temporary storage medium for executing processs to store their data, but think of RAM as a cache, for data.
SuperFetch
Microsoft has introduced this feature into Vista. In fact, it is nothing new and SuperFetch is the sucessor of prefetch that existed way back in Windows XP. Working on the same principle as prefetch but with improved performance and algorithm, SuperFetch’s main role is to preload the RAM with data and codes of programs. Such that when you call for a particular application, it can be loaded directly from the RAM and executed immedietely rather than reading from the hard disk which will introduce a longer loading time for the application.
Continue reading 'Windows Vista for Dummies: Where did all my RAM go?'»
