>  Certainly not true. Go to the proper system setting configuration dialog
> and turn off display hardware acceleration and then try eg. dragging a 
> window
> around. See if you can notice any difference between the CPU doing all the
> work vs. the display hardware doing it.

That's 2D acceleration, not 3D.  In the graphics card it's quite separate, 
and XP didn't use any of the 3D capabilities of the card.  Nowadays any 
decent 2D game will use the 3D capabilities of your card as it is much more 
efficient and flexible than using the "old" 2D accelerated functions, so 
it's only right than the OS should do the same.  Maybe on new graphics cards 
the 2D accelerated functions will be removed completely?

>  Oh, you would want your CPU usage to be 100% all the time (with the
> increased power consumption) and all the RAM consumed by the kernel so
> that it would be impossible to run any actual applications? That doesn't
> make any sense.

Why not? If a new app needs to be loaded and I have no free RAM, the OS 
simply decides which bit to disregard to free up space for the new app.  It 
seems more ludicrous to "wipe" the RAM every time an app is closed if you 
don't need it for something else.  People need to get out of the habit of 
thinking lower "used" RAM is better, it just doesn't make any sense because 
the OS can free up RAM whenever it needs to in an instant.

Post a reply to this message

scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> That's 2D acceleration, not 3D.

  You said that the graphics card sits completely idle in XP, and that the
CPU does *all* the work. What you said was clearly false.

> Maybe on new graphics cards 
> the 2D accelerated functions will be removed completely?

  Your jokes are not all that funny, really.

> >  Oh, you would want your CPU usage to be 100% all the time (with the
> > increased power consumption) and all the RAM consumed by the kernel so
> > that it would be impossible to run any actual applications? That doesn't
> > make any sense.

> Why not?

  Because you want to keep the CPU as idle as possible to conserve energy
(especially relevant in laptops, but also on desktop computers, and not
only from energy conserving point of view, but because running the CPU
at 100% all the time shortens its life).

> If a new app needs to be loaded and I have no free RAM, the OS 
> simply decides which bit to disregard to free up space for the new app.

  I thought you wanted apps to load faster rather than slower?

  Why would the kernel deliberately keep the full RAM allocated just to
free it when an app needs it?

>  It 
> seems more ludicrous to "wipe" the RAM every time an app is closed if you 
> don't need it for something else.  People need to get out of the habit of 
> thinking lower "used" RAM is better, it just doesn't make any sense because 
> the OS can free up RAM whenever it needs to in an instant.

  Your sentences are contradictory. First you say it doesn't make sense for
the kernel to free the RAM, and then you say that freeing RAM is a practically
free operation because it can be done "in an instant".

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

>  You said that the graphics card sits completely idle in XP, and that the
> CPU does *all* the work. What you said was clearly false.

I said 3D card.  I meant the 3D part of a graphics card.

>  Why would the kernel deliberately keep the full RAM allocated just to
> free it when an app needs it?

So that in the likely event that you run an app that was run before and 
still in RAM, it would load much faster.

>  Your sentences are contradictory. First you say it doesn't make sense for
> the kernel to free the RAM,

Not when it doesn't need to, no.

> and then you say that freeing RAM is a practically
> free operation because it can be done "in an instant".

Of course - what's contradictory about that?

The slow part is loading from HD to RAM, that should be avoided at all 
costs.  Marking RAM as "empty" when it is not needed for anything else at 
that moment seems a silly idea, and is why Vista has things like SuperFetch.

Post a reply to this message

scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> >  You said that the graphics card sits completely idle in XP, and that the
> > CPU does *all* the work. What you said was clearly false.

> I said 3D card.  I meant the 3D part of a graphics card.

  You clearly contrasted it with the CPU. You explicitly said that XP
draws everything with the CPU. That rather clearly means that when you
said "3D card" you were talking about the graphics card.

> The slow part is loading from HD to RAM, that should be avoided at all 
> costs.

  Have you ever heard of the concept of disk caches? You can even configure
how much is cached.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

>  Have you ever heard of the concept of disk caches? You can even configure
> how much is cached.

Isn't Vista's SuperFetch just a very clever disk cache that uses more RAM 
than its predecessors?

Really, what is the disadvantage with keeping as much stuff from disk in RAM 
as possible?  It just seems silly to me to erase stuff from RAM for the sole 
reason of making the "free RAM" counter higher, why not just erase it later 
when that RAM is actually needed by something else?

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
> Of course some people have different experiences, but I've been running 
> Vista for a while now as my main work machine (and at home) and have 
> never had any stability issues.

Same here. There's a couple of annoyances. I like the Vista media center 
less. If I do a chkdsk during boot (which I do before making a ghost 
backup), sometimes some programs won't start, as if there's some system 
library or service they're depending on that didn't get initialized until I 
reboot again.  Other than that, no problems here.  Hard to judge the speed 
since I upgraded the processor and drives as well.

> Actually the new GUI uses your 3D card to draw the graphics, under XP 
> your 3D card sat idle while the CPU did all the graphics...  BTW you can 
> always turn it off if you don't like it.

I like the new GUI. It has benefits besides just the glass borders. The 
drawing all happens in the background and gets composited, so it's real easy 
for the system to give live thumbnails of a program's window and stuff like 
that.

It does thrash a bit more than XP did with the same amount of RAM, but not 
so much as I find it a PITA. Just lots of disk activity when you switch 
between big programs. I think it manages to keep a much better track of what 
parts of the working set need to be swapped in first.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>>  Have you ever heard of the concept of disk caches? You can even 
>> configure
>> how much is cached.
> 
> Isn't Vista's SuperFetch just a very clever disk cache that uses more 
> RAM than its predecessors?

Sort of. It's more like a cache prefetch/readahead, based on the paging 
behavior of previous runs of the same program. Plus, if a program gets 
swapped out by something, when that new something exits, the old program 
gets swapped back in preemptively rather than on demand, making the system 
more responsive.

> Really, what is the disadvantage with keeping as much stuff from disk in 
> RAM as possible?  It just seems silly to me to erase stuff from RAM for 
> the sole reason of making the "free RAM" counter higher, why not just 
> erase it later when that RAM is actually needed by something else?

I think you're talking past each other. Scott is saying the kernel uses up 
all free RAM as disk buffers. Warp is saying "why would you want the kernel 
to use up all memory?" Clearly using it as a resizable cache is a good idea, 
while using all memory for something the kernel cannot discard when needed 
is a bad idea.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

Post a reply to this message

On 4/2/2009 12:44 AM, scott wrote:
> That's 2D acceleration, not 3D. In the graphics card it's quite
> separate,

For the past several years, they've been the same thing.  You just 
access them using different API calls.

-- 
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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On 4/1/2009 11:31 AM, Warp wrote:
> [GDS|Entropy]<gds-entropy    AT    hotmail   DOT  com>  wrote:
>> I'd be happy to stay with xp pro...but MS seems hellbent on forcing the
>> issue with pissta, and that I do not like..
>
>    That's one of the problems with Windows: You are more or less forced to
> submit to whatever whims Microsoft may have today. (The only other
> alternative is not never upgrade your system, leaving you wide open to
> any discovered security holes.)

That's one of the problems with providing commercial software: you have 
to actually pay your support staff!

MS can't (or won't) afford the staff to support 3 versions of Windows 
simultaneously, so they're trying to cut down.

Makes perfect sense to me.

-- 
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

Post a reply to this message

Chambers wrote:
> 
> MS can't (or won't) afford the staff to support 3 versions of Windows
> simultaneously, so they're trying to cut down.
> 

MS might actually stand a chance to afford that. They won't, because
it's not profitable.

-Aero

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