Update #1: Big thanks to Chris Hunkele for pointing out this story was complete BS written by an author over at Computer World that got canned afterward. WOOPS!
ComputerWorld is running a story about data collected from 22k Windows 7 machines via the exo.performance.net community that shows 85% of machines that are now running Windows 7 regularly take up 90-95% of the system’s total physical RAM during normal operation — likely causing disk thrashing to be much more common and thus poorer performance to be a complaint from a lot of these people.
A similar snapshot showed only 40% of these machines were maxed out on RAM when running Windows XP.
Does this mean that Windows 7 is a decroded piece of crap? No. It means that it uses more RAM than a 10 year old operating system.
I think these stupid little analysis are the price Microsoft pays for going such a long time with no incremental upgrades in between. You look at Mac and Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) and if you looked at ANY version of the OS from 10 years ago and compared it to the latest release, the difference in memory and CPU requirements would likely be staggering; but no one notices because we’ve never had to wait that long for an update and had such a drastic A and B comparison.
With rumors already leaking about Windows 8 and some saying Microsoft might be getting it’s mojo back, hopefully we can go back to looking at technical achievements and not useless stats.
Meh – this is such a non-issue it’s not even funny.
Remember that Windows Vista and Win7 both try to use a lot more ram for caching, and some of the internal tools have been modified to use a lot more ram to increase performance (check CHKDSK mem usage under Win7, for example).
Would you rather have 4GB of ram and the OS aggressively freeing everything and only 1 – 2 GB of ram in use even though you’re not running any memory intensive applications, or let the OS use as much as it can to cache data, and release it when apps request it (resulting in a performance increase — and fulling utilizing the resources you’ve purchased for the computer)?
Now – if apps weren’t running under Win7 that could run on XP with the same hardware, or if the OS wasn’t releasing the memory as apps request the allocations, then something is wrong – but from what I’ve heard this hasn’t been the issue.
Agreed – next we can discuss how much disk space Windows 7 takes up compared to a clean Windows XP (pre-SP1) install… or Palm OS 5 then ComputerWorld can use the title “Is Windows 7 BLOATED?!?!?!”
=)
its all crap
http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2010/02/21/insane-blogger-fools-reporter-gets-fired.aspx