Lots of free RAM (memory)
25 October 2006 at 5:21 pm | TechyWooHoo!
Installed a new 1 gb stick of ram in my tablet pc (total: 1.5 GB) and today for the first time actually saw free memory over a gig!!!
Of course, with Windows Vista this much free memory will be a thing of the past. It is smarter than other OS’s and actually makes sure as much of the available memory is used at any given time. After all, all this unused memory is a waste of resources and time.
- The memory is already in the system … so might as well put it to good use
- Why not prefetch applications and data and keep them ready for future use
But I wonder how will they handle the additional drain on battery life. I am guessing free memory vs. used memory has a different (and higher) power requirement.
In other news … my computer’s screensaver has toasters that fly.
Very quaint and yet so very cool still!
October 25th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Actually, most OSes these days put a disk cache in unused RAM. Win95, though, used to do this in such a sloppy way that the disk cache used to get swapped out to disk. How smart!
I wonder, though, would it be worth having the OS keep track of which blocks of DRAM are used, and instruct the northbridge to perform memory refresh only for those DRAM banks that are used? This used to be an idea when the CPU had to perform the refresh (which results in a slight boost in performance), but now battery life is more critical. DRAM cells draw power when they’re being refreshed.
I got you beat in the screensavers dept: XScreenSaver’s BSOD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScreenSaver
October 26th, 2006 at 12:56 am
Well, that was partially what I was thinking when I wondered how will Vista deal with trying to balance using all of the RAM (meaning more refreshes) and saving battery life.
Seeing how even 3 hours of quality battery life is tough to get, I would want to have some control over this (atleast an optional “battery saver mode”)
C’mon … why would I need a BSOD screensaver when my OS can do it on-demand (sometimes, without demand!!!