Is it superfetch, Vista or something else?

C

Canadian in Berlin

Gawd
Joined
Sep 8, 2007
Messages
697
So, I'm still trying to get used to vista, I notice a small improvement with superfetch, but Firefox and Thunderbird were never programs that took a long time to open, and otherwise, I haven't seen much benefit. Otherwise, the only other GOOD thing I've noticed thats a good thing in Vista is that STALKER runs and doesn't blue screen.

What I have noticed, is that trying to Alt-Tab between programs in Vista is a nightmare. I do this all the time, I often am playing a game, having IM conversations and cruising the web. The problem with Vista is that when I alt-tab, it seems to dump as much of the game as possible from memory (woooo HD thrashing). Then when I go back in, it does it loads it all back in and I get more HD thrashing.

is this normal? can I tweak this?
 
How much ram do you have and how many things at a time are you running? How many of those things are memory hogs?

If you are running normalish apps that should not be an issue. I am tabbing between WoW, Firefox, Winamp, GAIM, and a SSH session atm (for example) with no mess. This is on my PC sig rig.
 
Thunderbird, Firefox, Pidgin (MSN) and Sins of a Solar Empire/STALKER/Galactic Civs 2 (only one game at once :p)... and thats about it. I trim out as many unnecessary programs/services as I can.

I have 2GB, 2.6GHZ Dual core Proc. It works just fine in XP.

edit: Can't believe I forgot to mention RAM and Processor. :S
 
Vista does use noticeably more virtual memory for games than XP, because it's holding extra video information in the games' virtual address spaces. There's a hotfix, albeit not one which has been released widely (ie, YMMV):
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3060&p=2
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105

However, I'm not sure if this would cause thrashing when alt-tabbing or not. Such thrashing is certainly that you're running out of free RAM, and is unlikely to be the fault of Superfetch; I had it on my old 1GB Windows XP laptop.
 
You need more ram. I wouldn't run Vista and try to multitask with a game with less than 4GB.
 
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