86% of Windows 7 PCs Maxing Out Memory

CWmike writes "Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks. The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory 'saturation' point, and this comes despite more RAM being available on most Windows 7 machines. 'This is alarming,' Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. 'For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is.'"

Comments

Re:When do people get this

[theaveng]

I do energy analysis for systems, and "active RAM" does in fact use more energy than idle RAM. Not a huge difference but enough to add-up over multiple banks and affect the size of a power supply (for worst case). Active RAM has the same periodic refresh cycle of idle RAM, but also the constant reading/writing of data over the system bus, which means about twice the energy used.

Therefore I concur with the grandparent poster's statement.

Re:When do people get this

[Z00L00K]

And just recently the hardware has been getting decent enough to run XP.

So when the hardware is decent enough to run Windows 7 we will need something else.