Windows 7 Windows 7 Uses More RAM Than The Other Two Operating Systems

[Celestra]

February 17, 2010

Window 7 computers consume nearly all RAM; less than half of the XP PCs do, which results in performance bottlenecks. According to data from "Devil Mountain Software" Craig Barth- Chief Technical Officer.

86% of the Windows 7 computers in his XP Net Pool are regularly consuming 90%- 95% of their available RAM. Which results in slowdowns as the systems turn to disk based virtual memory to handle tasks. The low memory condition of most Windows 7 PCs is even more notable considering the amount of RAM. An average 3.3 GB of memory as compared to XPs 1.7 GB and Windows Vista 2.7 GBs.

XP Net's data couldn't determine whether the memory usage was by the Windows 7 Operating System itself or an increased amount of applications. But they are working on finding the dominant factor in the increased memory use.

 

[Radenight]

I really don't think Windows 7 uses more ram than Vista or XP.. On all of my pc's it only consumes between 16%-20% respectively.. And that's without any tweaking or anything like that... Granted that probably will go up a bit once I have them all networked but even then I doubt it'll go up that much more...

 

[cybercore]

It probably depends on the total RAM installed, right now I have 8 windows open and 72 processes running, and my memory consumption is 1,59 Gb of 8 total. I reckon having it very similar in Vista.

 

[whoosh]

It probably depends on the total RAM installed, right now I have 8 windows open and 72 processes running, and my memory consumption is 1,59 Gb of 8 total. I reckon having it very similar in Vista.

I would have to say that I find the memory usage with only four gig of ram very economical . My consumption normally stays around the 30% mark . when cruising .

 

[kemical]

Same here.. I have 3GB and usage usually hovers around the 1GB mark. Plus doesn't 7 and vista use RAM in a completely different way to XP? XP users mistakenly think that because the RAM usage looks high in vista/7 that it's a bad thing..

All that's actually happening is that the most common used app's are already loaded up in the RAM ready to be used. As to which app's are loaded depends on the user and his or her actions when using said machine. Windows vista/7 keeps a record of which app's you use and so makes sure they are ready in the RAM for immediate use.

 

[Mike]

Same here.. I have 3GB and usage usually hovers around the 1GB mark. Plus doesn't 7 and vista use RAM in a completely different way to XP? XP users mistakenly think that because the RAM usage looks high in vista/7 that it's a bad thing..

All that's actually happening is that the most common used app's are already loaded up in the RAM ready to be used. As to which app's are loaded depends on the user and his or her actions when using said machine. Windows vista/7 keeps a record of which app's you use and so makes sure they are ready in the RAM for immediate use.

Yes you're referring to the Superfetch code introduced in Vista. This was scaled back a bit in Windows 7 and optimized quite a bit. Also, Windows 7's code has been optimized big time.. the thing WILL run on a Pentium 4 with 1GB of SDRAM. 7 is not caching the RAM as much as Vista did, because in some cases, I do believe it did create a performance bottleneck. And the Aero interface now uses something like 5-10MB of memory as opposed to 25-50MB footprint in Vista. There are some who have concluded running Aero transparency is actually faster now than the classic theme, because its loaded into GPU memory and not using up application resources and so on. I can't confirm this though.

I may conduct a test on all 3 systems to see exactly what the RAM is out of the box on the same virtual hardware.. but its incongruent, because it all depends on how efficiently the RAM is used. The theory behind Vista was that any RAM that was not in use was being wasted, so it should be cache'd.