YEAH! Don’t I have a long wish list, two quads, dual SLI 8800’s and 16 gigs of 1066 DDRIII. In my Dreams!!!  OH! But I can dream!

 

With the advent of MS’s idea of self sustaining and maintaining systems, more than a dozen of those programs are running in the background at one time. This is excluding Anti-Virus, Defrag, and other standard tools such as SuperFetch. With the right Snap-in you can see all that is going on under the hood. Typically my system uses 450 to 960 megs also. That causes a problem for Vue since that prog requires at least 1 gig to function, and 2 gigs to do its job properly. 

 

While monitoring Vue with some of Vista’s tools, I find that in a 2 gig system, when Vue does not get its 1 gig, it tries to access areas of memory that are reserved and off limits to other programs, unless they have privileged access, which Vue does not. All of this usually causes a crash, when the system gets stressed.   Vista will shutdown a program and restart if possible when this happens, something XP does not do. Unfortunately, Vue is not coded to take advantage of these features and hangs the system or crashes. So, 4 gigs or more is the only current remedy for this problem, even if you have a 32 bit system. You may not think that extra gig is going to get used, but the system will quietly find a use for it, especially if it needs the extra memory to get itself out of a crash. 

 

That is where Readyboost comes in handy in a 2 gig system, when you have 4 extra gigs of fast flash ram that can run at speeds of 160x to 200x, you will notice a boost over the system access times, especially if you have slow drives. And, Vista will consistently use the extra Cache for other system tasks if you have a good quality USB Flash Drive. 

Typically my very fast IDE drive will access at about 120x compared to flash, while my SATA runs at about 160x. I do not know about SCSI. Choose your Flash carefully, and take the time to find out what speed they really work at. 

 

Most do not advertise the speeds, as they barely make the minimum requirements to run under Vista. That is a savings for the manufacturers, but not for you. Right now you can find very fast USB Flash from 200x to 300x. Of course they are expensive, but the right Flash will make a difference to Vista.  Vue cannot use this extra memory, only the system and other related progs do.

 

Microsoft wanted to have a system that did not require user intervention or user maintenance, and could report all that MS needed to diagnose and stabilize the OS. There are programs that monitor everything, which has been a hot debate by the privacy advocates. I like them simply because I can find out what has happened when something is going wrong. I now have an idea of where to look for a solution.   Do not get the wrong impression, I did not say I love MS.  I divorced them a long time ago.

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