Vista Feedback

Where do I put feedback for Vista? (i.e. feature requests / bug reports etc...)

I can't see anywhere on connect and I was wondering where to cast my pearls of wisdom

I can't even remember what they were at the moment, but I'm convinced they were insightful, intelligent and probably eloquently put as well.

ok well then one small question:

boot up your machine from a clean install.  do a three finger salute.  what does the memory usage say?

i just saw a review that was touting the diagnostics, and the mem usage said 1.5gb.  i can't imagine what they were running.  quake 4 only uses 1gb.

I've said it before, I'll say it again and I'll keep saying it until people stop worrying about it.

Memory usage is a good thing! What do you want free memory for? It's wasted space until something uses it. And Vista makes aggressive use of it for caching and whatnot.

Don't complain until you start thrashing the page file, then you can complain.

Most people also don't seem to realize that it's a good thing. You are supposed to be using the computer's memory, not have as much of it free as possible .

Windows is also pretty smart about sending programs to the swapfile if a game or somesuch requires memory that other programs are hogging too much.

Massif wrote:

I've said it before, I'll say it again and I'll keep saying it until people stop worrying about it.

Memory usage is a good thing! What do you want free memory for? It's wasted space until something uses it. And Vista makes aggressive use of it for caching and whatnot.

Don't complain until you start thrashing the page file, then you can complain.

ya know what?  i've never even thought of it that way...

i guess that mean's i'm impresionable.  the tech media does seem to make a big deal of large memory footprint apps...

wow.  now i feel dumb.

Stebet wrote:

Most people also don't seem to realize that it's a good thing. You are supposed to be using the computer's memory, not have as much of it free as possible .

Windows is also pretty smart about sending programs to the swapfile if a game or somesuch requires memory that other programs are hogging too much.

Well, that's only true if you're using RAM memory, not virtual memory.

Part of the problem (at least in WinXP; don't know about Vista) is that there's no distinction between physical and virtual memory in the chart. To the normal user, it would look like it's a bad thing for my "Page File Usage" to reach 1.5 GB even though, it's a good thing for the "Usage" to be 935 MB (or anything <= 1GB).
[By the way, my laptop has 1 GB of RAM. Feel free to substitute in the amount of RAM that you have.]

Edit: Since you said we could..
*complains about a thrashing page file whenever he runs NASA WorldWind and VS .NET 2005 at the same time*

So if you would read up Vista has a feature called SuperFetch where it takes your most often used applications and stores them in your unused memory, therefore next time you launch that application it will launch in half the time.  Why do you want free memory laying around when it can be used, if an application needs to use that memory Vista lets it, the memory is not marked as used its marked as free to other applications but the memory manager keeps real free memory at a higher priority.

Free memory gets used first, Cache memory second, and Paging third. 

Thats the jist of this very complex feature that does an astounding job of increasing startup times of your most common applications.

Massif wrote:

I've said it before, I'll say it again and I'll keep saying it until people stop worrying about it.

Memory usage is a good thing! What do you want free memory for? It's wasted space until something uses it. And Vista makes aggressive use of it for caching and whatnot.

Don't complain until you start thrashing the page file, then you can complain.

Hello from a newcomer....

My 2 cents on this is this: all well and good until you try to start a large VPC and Vista says "not enough memory...". Seems like Vista will gobble up to about 1/2 your RAM, so to get an extra 1 GB of space you need to add 2 GBs of chips.

Am I really seeing much better performance with a 1.5 GB cache, as opposed to a 500 MB cache? I mean, really? I'd rather be able to load a 3 GB data file than have IE pop up like lightening. Is there any way to control the caching to keep it at a reasonable level? That's all I want... control. (Absolute control...hehe).

TuringCoreDuo2 wrote:



Massif wrote: I've said it before, I'll say it again and I'll keep saying it until people stop worrying about it. Memory usage is a good thing! What do you want free memory for? It's wasted space until something uses it. And Vista makes aggressive use of it for caching and whatnot. Don't complain until you start thrashing the page file, then you can complain.

Hello from a newcomer....

My 2 cents on this is this: all well and good until you try to start a large VPC and Vista says "not enough memory...". Seems like Vista will gobble up to about 1/2 your RAM, so to get an extra 1 GB of space you need to add 2 GBs of chips.

Am I really seeing much better performance with a 1.5 GB cache, as opposed to a 500 MB cache? I mean, really? I'd rather be able to load a 3 GB data file than have IE pop up like lightening. Is there any way to control the caching to keep it at a reasonable level? That's all I want... control. (Absolute control...hehe).

Regarding the caching algorithm, as far as I can recall, Vista only caches applications. Does anyone know if it also caches frequently used documents?

TuringCoreDuo2 wrote:



Hello from a newcomer....

My 2 cents on this is this: all well and good until you try to start a large VPC and Vista says "not enough memory...". Seems like Vista will gobble up to about 1/2 your RAM, so to get an extra 1 GB of space you need to add 2 GBs of chips.

Am I really seeing much better performance with a 1.5 GB cache, as opposed to a 500 MB cache? I mean, really? I'd rather be able to load a 3 GB data file than have IE pop up like lightening. Is there any way to control the caching to keep it at a reasonable level? That's all I want... control. (Absolute control...hehe).

Hello!

Um, I've loaded up various VPCs (granted not all at once) and Vista's never skipped a beat when it comes to clearing the memory decks for them. Are you speaking from experience of hypotheticalising (is that even a word?)

I'm certainly seeing better performance, but then it's a pretty hard thing to measure.

As for data files, I have no idea whether they get cached, but I'd imaging that any file large enough to be a significant percentage of your available memory probably wouldn't. Having said that the largest files I work with at a time are 10 ~ 20MB image files, and they load pretty darn fast.

Massif wrote:



TuringCoreDuo2 wrote:  Hello from a newcomer.... My 2 cents on this is this: all well and good until you try to start a large VPC and Vista says "not enough memory...". Seems like Vista will gobble up to about 1/2 your RAM, so to get an extra 1 GB of space you need to add 2 GBs of chips. Am I really seeing much better performance with a 1.5 GB cache, as opposed to a 500 MB cache? I mean, really? I'd rather be able to load a 3 GB data file than have IE pop up like lightening. Is there any way to control the caching to keep it at a reasonable level? That's all I want... control. (Absolute control...hehe).

Hello!

Um, I've loaded up various VPCs (granted not all at once) and Vista's never skipped a beat when it comes to clearing the memory decks for them. Are you speaking from experience of hypotheticalising (is that even a word?)

I'm certainly seeing better performance, but then it's a pretty hard thing to measure.

As for data files, I have no idea whether they get cached, but I'd imaging that any file large enough to be a significant percentage of your available memory probably wouldn't. Having said that the largest files I work with at a time are 10 ~ 20MB image files, and they load pretty darn fast.

I had a VPC set to 1024MB RAM (a MOSS 2007 testbed... ugh!) on a 2 GB laptop, and since Vista had gobbled up over 1 gig of my 2 gigs RAM, well, I got the "not enough memory, please close something" message. Vista seems pretty good at readjusting once a big app gets loaded (I could load 6 or 7 Visual Studio instances, and then close them, and voila Vista is pushed back down below a gig...) but it does not seem to drop the cache if it needs extra space to load file in the first place.

All that being said, it is generally distressing to see the heap grow that way - when I start it seems to take about 27% or RAM (900 MBs on my current system). Do nothing but leave it on overnight, and in the morning it's up to 40+% (1.1 GB or so). That just feels like a leak. A "flush" button (or handle...) would be really useful, at least for power users who may need to free up as much RAM as possible (developers, video editors, etc.).