As the release date approaches, there are more and more messages about Windows Vista. However, many of these messages are wrong. In short, Vista has been misunderstood very deeply. Not long ago, a message that Windows Vista consumes 800M of memory is ubiquitous online, but is it true? Let's take a look at an analysis by a foreign author.
You may have seen Windows Vista consuming 800M of memory in idle state, but this is just a misunderstanding, the reality is not so exaggerated. In order to eliminate misunderstandings, it is important to figure out 3 issues: The amount of memory submitted for change (PF usage) is what it means; the Beta screenshot does not represent the final version; Windows adjusts the memory usage scheme according to the system's conditions.
First, let's look at what the amount of memory is committed, which is what is shown as PF usage and commit changes on task Manager. The amount of memory submitted is organized under the x86 architecture for 4096 of pages, and is the demand request of the process for its own use (private, not shared or mapped). Users are often puzzled by the amount of memory that is not equal to physical memory minus the amount of memory submitted for change. In simple terms, the amount of memory to commit changes (PF usage) is not the amount of physical memory or paging file currently in use, but the total number of private virtual memory requests by the process (either in RAM or in the paging file).
Take a screenshot of the Task Manager, which is widely circulated on the Internet, as an example, which claims that Vista consumes 800M of memory in idle state. However, in this figure, the physical memory being used is only 395M, which is more roughly 400M. Most of the system's 1G memory is still available.
Also, the screenshot itself does not reflect the new version of Vista or the memory usage in some other environment. The image below is a screenshot of the Vista Ultimate Edition plus IIS7 and the Virtual Server R2 that ran the search service from my machine. With these services, the amount of memory committed changes is about 665M.