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Windows 8 To Reduce Memory Footprint

Posted by timothy on from the those-sound-like-good-ideas dept.

bheer writes "Microsoft's Windows 8 blog has a good post about the work being done to reduce Windows 8's memory footprint. The OS will use multiple approaches to do this, including combining RAM pages, re-architecting old bits of code and adding new APIs for more granular memory management. Interestingly, it will also let services start on a trigger and stop when needed instead of running all the time."

1 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Hope so... by IANAAC · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It's been a long time since I've dealt with Windows other than XP in a VM, and even that is rare.

    My old Asus netbook recently died, so I was forced to go out and buy another. I bought an Aspire One loaded with W7S. I really wanted to like W7. Really. I liked the interface. But damn, it was really slow and memory hungry. With no pgms running, it was taking up about 560-580M of memory, compared to Ubuntu (11.04) taking 260-270M with no pgms running.

    I really couldn't have more than two programs running in W7 without hitting 900M memory use. Granted, they were big pgms - Thunderbird and Firefox, both latest versions. But contrast that with Ubuntu where I ran TB, FF, Pidgin, Hotot, Tobmoy, LibreOffice and Rhythmbox all at the same time and never go above the 850M mark in memory use (at least not yet).

    This release of Ubuntu has its own set of problems (Compiz, anyone?), but I much prefer it to W7. If MS can get Window's memory usage down I'd be more inclined to use the latest version.