What type of primary operating system you use on regular basis?

But does Vista actually hit swap/page file before XP, provided they're both running the same apps, etc? A conversation I had a while back with an MS employee ended in the realm of Vista not really eating more actual ram than XP would, just caching much more when ram was free.

 

I don't use any. Well, unless Windows Defender counts.

 

I really don't care to be honest. I expanded my system to 6 GB because they're practically giving memory away now. I've never had problems running out of memory in Vista, and I doubt I will anytime soon.
For me it's simple: the small investment I made in more memory resulted in a far smoother system in Vista (although XP/XP x64 didn't seem to know what to do with the extra memory, and haven't improved performance past 1 GB really). So for me it's money well spent. My system runs better than ever.

I also have a laptop... I specifically chose a model with 2 GB installed, because of Vista, and that one runs very smoothly aswell.

 

I think that's a VERY limited view of an OS.
Yes it uses more memory... Then again, Windows XP used more memory than 2000, and 2000 used more memory than NT4, etc.
But that's not the only difference between those OSes, obviously.
Especially in the case of Vista, the overall system is just a much smoother experience for me. I don't have to wait for applications to load, I don't sit in HDD rattling all the time... The system is less noisy because of that, funny enough. I now get annoyed when I go back to XP, and hear the HDD seeking like crazy, and nothing getting done.

 

This is an important detail that often gets ignored when that argument is used. RAM is only cache until you run out of it.

On the other topic of whether to go 64 bit or no. I see that some people believe it's only worth it when you have > 3.25 gb of RAM. The truth is that going to 64 bit will allow your processes to tap into more than 2gb of virtual address space (ignore PAE because everyone else does) even if you have less RAM than that.

 

I will stay with xp32 as my games run just fine, as does everything else. No need to waste faster hardware just to run the os. I want faster hardware to run my games more smoothly, not the os.

 

You're willfully ignoring what the operating system is doing with that memory.

 

*sigh*

Do you know the difference between "needs" and "can use"? Needs insinuates requirement, as in it will not function without it. This is not the case with Vista, which is why your argument is invalid.

It can use memory that is not otherwise allocated for large amounts of disk cache -- far better than it worked on XP. And if/when that ram is truly needed by an application, it is easily and quickly given up.

So what you're actually saying is this: you'd rather that the full resources of your machine go unused for no other reason than to make you feel good about -- what? How many resources you have that are unused?

 

You're using a news article from a year ago, that is talking about performance in Vista SP1 that was still months away, and was comparing it to XP SP3 which was also still months away? So you're comparing BETA software to BETA software, and declaring one a winner?

Do you realize the massive logical fallacy you just made up?

Why don't we try looking at benchmarks from within the last six months, maybe even try looking at benchmarks where they were testing production-released software? Here's an example: ExtremeTech does a review of Vista SP1 vs XP SP3 on an E6750, 2Gb of ram, an SB Extreme Gamer and an ATI 3870.

Guess who won? Actually don't guess, go read the article and find out for yourself. And then come back when you realize how wrong your linked article was...

 

You're still being dense.

Here's some memory usage stats from a machine I administer.

Code:

Mem:  32942312k total, 28244864k used,  4697448k free,   155912k buffers
Swap:  2104472k total,      432k used,  2104040k free, 26316116k cached

One of those numbers is the reason why it's got 32GB in it rather than 4GB. Can you guess which one it it?

By your argument there's a massive technical problem with the operating system which its running, which is a memory hog (and is called "Linux").

 

I think you just made it.