When I originally installed Windows 7 64-bit, I had 4GB in my machine. While the performance improvements I saw were noticable and appreciated, it was clear that Windows 7 was more than happy to consume all the RAM I could possibly throw at it:
At the urging of Grant Gochanuer (happy owner of 12GB of RAM), I went ahead and upgraded the RAM in my machine from 4GB to 8GB.
After a full day of use, Windows 7 Resource Monitor looks like this:
While the performance difference is not night and day for me, I will say that the first thing you notice is that the more RAM you give Windows 7, the less often it seems to hit the hard drive.
I have some fairly monsterous Firefox working profiles and Java IDE configurations that by all accounts brought my old Windows XP and Vista installs to their knees on loadup. Now with 8GB in Windows 7, my disk blinks lazily along while everything stays completely responsive and whatever I’m loading fires up in half the time (give or take).
I will say one huge data point that used to drive me crazy on my old Windows install was when I fired up my working Firefox profile for blogging — I maintain 10 or so tabs at all times in this working profile, each site a Gmail account or WordPress administrative interface along with AJAX traffic analysis tools — pretty much a worst case as far as JavaScript/Memory load times go. On my old installs of Windows loading up this profile could take anywhere from 10-20 seconds depending on what my computer was currently doing. Now it seems regardless of what I’m doing (Java IDE + VMWare for example), the profile comes up in about 6-8 seconds and doesn’t seem to trash my hard drive anymore.
Windows 7 is becoming a must-have upgrade for me and anyone else willing to throw some serious memory at it. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than an SSD and this 8GB upgrade only cost me $94.
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6. May 2009 at 2:28 pm
“I will say that the first thing you notice is that the more RAM you give Windows 7, the less often it seems to hit the hard drive.”
Yeah, there’s a filesystem cache. Anything that has been read tries to stay in RAM until something better comes along. Most OS’s do this. I don’t really know how to compare the OS’s, I’ve just tweaked/observed the Solaris version of the fs cache.
Once Ext4 or btrfs gets stable in Linux, it’s really not going to matter. I/O seems to be the huge bottleneck these days and a copy on write filesystem has to be seen to be believed (ok maybe it’s not life changing …).
6. May 2009 at 3:33 pm
I can’t wait until Win7 released and I build a new system. I’m planning for an icore7 processor with 12 GB of RAM. If my budget allows.
6. May 2009 at 4:08 pm
Jigsaw,
Good call, like the 920 or something? $254 or so last time I checked, the reall sink-hole is the dang motherboards… but all in all a Core i7 920, Mobo + 12GB of RAM and GPU were right around $1k which I thought was pretty reasonable for a “pretty close to the top” performing computer.
10. May 2009 at 5:06 pm
Uh oh… If it’s going to be lagging on 4GB of RAM, it will NEVER run on my current computers, I already have trouble with Vista.
No more Windows for me.
16. May 2009 at 6:34 pm
@RaceCar: W7 will perform better than Vista.
22. October 2009 at 10:17 pm
I’m in the process of installing Windows 7 right now on my machine with 8GB of RAM. This will really be the first time I’ve used 64-bit Windows. Will I be in for any surprises as far as driver support is concerned? I remember that being reported as a big issue with 64-bit XP and Vista.
23. October 2009 at 8:51 am
Tim,
Only because I don’t know the devices you’ll try and use, go ahead and assume you *will* run into some snags, just so you aren’t surprised. That being said, I had no driver issues with 64-bit Windows 7 but I *did* with Windows 2k3 64-bit years ago and Windows Vista 64-bit oddly enough — namely with installers that would crap out with “This operating system is not supported” because the installers would do stupid checks against the 32/64 and just die.
Oddly enough I didn’t run into any of those “technicality” type of issues in Windows 7 — everything literally just worked. So I want to prepare you for any hickups you have, but that being said, you will most likely have much better experience/luck with Windows 7 64-bit than Vista.
This is the first time I’ve done an exclusive 64-bit OS and not regretted it, I wouldn’t go back to 32-bit Windows 7 at this point.
23. October 2009 at 8:57 am
So far so good. The biggest problem I encountered was the fault of my slow, old RAID controller. I ditched that, used the on-board RAID, and now it flies.
Well, America’s Army 3 doesn’t work (and only checks after it downloads and installs 4GB of data) but I never got to play it on Linux or Mac OS anyway so it’s not that big of a deal.
9. January 2010 at 4:46 pm
hahaha u suckers paid while I got mine for free … i just paid shipping and handling http://alturl.com/tgn7