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(one that saves it's content to an imagefile when the computer it shutdown/rebooted, and with regular automated backups in the unlikely case I should have a windows crash or power glitch). Helps a lot.Why don't you take a single processor CPU with 1 Gigabyte and download a few thousand emails from Eudora (which works its mail through an Inbox that is in memory) and open a few dozen Firefox tabs and a few other browsers and have a couple of dozen programs open and then report back. If on your system you have a well-behaved game or graphics or web-dev program .. what difference does it make ?I used to run with and AMD64-3500+ (2.2GHz) and 1gig of ram - before that, I had a P4 2.53GHz w/512meg ram (later upgraded to 1gig, iirc). I've put those systems under a lot of stress, lots of uptime, and never ever would a program like cleanmem have helped anything. A thing that did matter for the 512meg system was specifying sane pagefile sizes, so the system didn't have to expand the pagefile... that was a very costly operation. I don't think I've ran XP with less than 512meg ram, but I used Win2000 comfortable with 256meg - and still no "memory optimizers".-Steven Avery
What surprises me in your approach is how you don't even address the timing issue. That for Windows XP to do "stuff" (and likely the wrong stuff) late .. after your keystroke creates a crises .. is doofus memory management. XP should be prepared for the next need with CPU and memory attuned and ready to go. This idea that you wait a long time while XP tries to clear out space is simply an operating system weakness. And one that CleanMem helps address.Why should process working sets be trimmed before it's necessary? I'd be frustrated from the possibly unnecessary disk I/O this would cause.-Steven Avery
There is an irony that you mention Visual Studio as the major memory-CPU part of your earlier system. I would assume that VS uses the .Net function that encouraged CleanMem that is largely ignored elsewhere. Thus keeping a light footprint.What is the ".Net function that encouraged CleanMem"? If you mean garbage collection, then that isn't anything at all like process working set trimming. I mention VS since it's a relatively resource-heavy program (sitting at 112MB private bytes with a relatively small solution open). Eclipse (java) sits at 130MB with my schoolstuff workspace open. Those are two of the heavier often-in-use applications I keep running... firefox is, by far, the biggest sinner - it's no unusual for it to sit at 5-800 megabytes private bytes if I haven't restarted the browser all day.-Steven Avery
And you say you disabled the Pagefile and ran with 1 Gigabyte. I am not sure how that works, I read a bit about that way of running and decided against it, I think I remember warnings that it would not work well if at all, perhaps you have different ideas to share. Clearly the moment you disable the pagefile you have a radically different system, making any comparison one of apples and kumquats.Back when I had 1GB in my system, there'd be an occasional hiccup (read: application crash) if I tried to run recent games without PF enabled, but as a whole things worked well (this was before FF-Steven Avery
). With 2GB I never ran into problems, and in my current system I have 8GB - no pagefile, permanent ramdisk running, and everything flies.Note specifically the point about a lot of memory released that does not go to the pagefile. From Ian Griffith beginning "I'm unconvinced by the points regarding the way Windows pages out applications that are idle.". It seems that this bears directly on the issues involved with CleanMem as well.What he's referring to is page discard, and that (as he says) only happens with pages that aren't dirty (ie, haven't been written to). This is a relatively tiny amount of memory for most programs, compared to the writable data allocated. Discarding does mean that you don't need to write pages to the pagefile, but it isn't free - once the code/data is needed again, it will be re-read from disk. And disk is slow compared to memory.-Steven Avery
I'd like to run programs/apps without having to restart them for any reason. I shouldn't have to. XP's management does not work for every situation or computer.Complain to the programmers who write buggy, memory-leaking software-cmpm
But you have to restart firefox sometimes, with or without cleanmem or any other help.Yes, obviously cleanmem (or anything else) won't help about programs that have memory leaks - the only thing that works is restarting the program.-cmpm
Cleaning temp files periodically as well as clearing the cache helps with mem and cpu.How does cleaning temp files help wrt. cpu/memory?-cmpm
Agreed. Management doing preemptively, casually in the background, a helpful function that XP does very late in the day of crises, after slowdowns, while you are waiting, and not fully.It trims the working set when minimizing windows, if the application hasn't overridden the default behavior.-Steven Avery
I have removed a cover from the back of my desktop, and have fed SATA and IDE data and power cables from inside, to the fresh air. It is easy to hookup a spare HD for data transfer.I'd say a lot more, since you need a poweroff to plug/unplug drives - whereas USB and FireWire are hotplug.
Slightly more hassle than a USB external HD case.
About the same hassle as hooking up a USB adapter.-yogi22 (March 29, 2009, 08:40 AM)
Well, if the backup BIOS is used to boot, the malware isn't going to activate, is it?Not quite, because you still have to boot the afflicted Mboard to perform the flash. In which case the "Bugg" can simply block the overwrite of its own block. The creators of the expliot referred to this "feature" as being trivial to implement.... (except of course on motherboards where the flashrom chip can be removed from the motherboard - most seem to be directly soldered on, though).-f0dder (March 23, 2009, 04:05 PM)
And any motherboard that has dual BIOS chips since the 'backup' BIOS is generally non-writable, (well, at least on the Gigabyte boards), so you can always cross-flash the normal boot BIOS back into the hacked BIOS.
IIRC, the Gigabyte boards also default back to the non-writable BIOS if something out-of-ordinary is detected in the default boot BIOS, (I'll have to read my manual a bit more I think).-4wd (March 28, 2009, 07:02 PM)-Stoic Joker (March 28, 2009, 10:13 PM)
Yes, XP memory management is grossly deficient when you are running a dozen or two programs and it has a 1 GB to work with. That is what is wrong.I used to run 32bit XP with a gig of memory, page file disabled, and no problems whatsoever. Including several weeks of uptime (this was before I had a linux server to do various tasks), and running both games and heavy stuff like visual studio.
This occurs on any system. You probably avoid it by watchiong memory and closing programs and such. I've seen it on puter after puter. XP will choke very easily, forcing a hard boot.
1. EmptyWorkingSet Function isn't SetProcessWorkingSetSize Function!Show me proof?-majoMO
2. "Empty.exe" (Microsoft tool) isn't "Clearmem.exe" (MS tool also)! Their actions are not the same!I don't know those two tools, but if one works by "allocate insane amounts of memory" (lame) and the other does SetProcessWorkingSetSize(p,-1,-1) on all processes (better, but misguided) - sure.-majoMO
P.S.: Worse than real Windows Myths are... the Myths created by "experts" guys with the Windows Anti-Myths...Myths are bad, no matter who propagates them. I digged into the issue and have shown my findings... if you'd rather believe fairytales, your problem.-majoMO
Which is quite a bit on my current 1MB system (twice the total memory !) and will be quite a bit on any XP sytem, where the max usable for programs is about 3.5 MB. Why you think 2MB is twiddles is a real puzzle, I think you have too much emotionally invested in your view.So, you're comparing the results of running a memory trimmer on a regular x86 box to memory constraints on a smartphone? Come on, be serious.-Steven Avery
That sounds interesting, but isn't one of Python's biggest problems that it doesn't come as part of the standard Windows build (definitely does in most Linux distros, not sure about Mac)? With a performance boost and this pre-installation, Python could have an extremely exciting future.I can't see Microsoft including Python as standard with Windows... and it wouldn't really be fair to other programming languages, either. Why's it necessary, anyway? It's easy enough to download python, and I guess it should be possible to bundle it for non-tech users-mnemonic (March 27, 2009, 03:09 AM)
. The three screenshots are before trim, right after trim, and after looking through the 6 active tabs again (no scrolling, no loading of new pages, no pressing anything except activation each of the three tabs).I can't imagine them getting through this even remotely unscathed. I imagine unwrapping this will be no more difficult than unwrapping the protection they've been using up until this point.Probably - but with a bit of smartness, they could do watermarking to track down leakers. That's not going to be foolproof either, but every little thing counts
Ehtyar.-Ehtyar (March 25, 2009, 07:55 PM)
True but you're still left with an underpowered PC compared to XP with those specs.Dunno about that, really. I don't find Vista to be very CPU-draining, and x4500HD is (more than!) enough for running Aero pleasantly. The only thing a bit on the low end is the RAM, but that isn't a problem either - I'd even say it's a non-issue for people who aren't going to run anything heavy. I do appreciate 2GB in my laptop, but then again that's used for Eclipse, VS2008, SQL Server 2005 et cetera - a bit more than casual web browsing and some text editing
See, that's the thing. You don't make large text documents. You create a .txt for each specific option. Often times proper folder hierarchy goes a long way. The only time you need .chm files is if you want to bleed your eyes out learning the ins and outs of the program and even then, rarely are they as useful as a book specifically for it. These are newbies we are talking about. Most of them won't have a problem with Linux if they all just rtfm or in this case rtf.chm. Of course this doesn't happen often enough though.Navigating folder hierarchy, opening text files, and using filemanager "find in files" to look for a topic is easier than HtmlHelp? O_o
I think it would be even worse if you're on Linux and then you need a Windows program and wine can't emulate it well. Also remember that the Ubuntu model is much simpler to learn than XP. It both has a GUI installation guide from LiveCD and an actual LiveCD. You're also not bound to get infected by viruses because you tried connecting to the internet before installing an AV ESPECIALLY with newbies who don't know how prone to viruses Windows machine are.
IMO, I don't get why you don't just put XP with specs like those.Probably because Vista comes standard with laptops today, and XP is usually an extra expense? Besides, Vista isn't as bad as a lot of people claim (after all, I'm still running it after my 30-day immersion experiment).
I really feel that the .chm files or whatever people call it is just containing too small to read texts that has a hard to get documentation because it relies on searching and trees.Too small to read? depends on the font size used. And if the index tree is done properly, it's much easier to use than Ctrl+F'ing through a large text document (and besides, you still have full-text search with .chm - win/win).
My ideal OS would probably be a Linux distro based on Ubuntu like Linux Mint on a Gnome set up with a pre-configured XP on Virtualbox with basic instructions on how to move files between each other and a guide as to how to explain the slicing of RAM when running virtualized environment as well as to check how much RAM your current programs are eating up before activating XP.For absolute beginners? O_o - bad idea. I wouldn't dare anything like that with non-powerusers. Even people that have been using computers for 10+ years but never took it beyond what they need for the office would be confused by this kind of setup.
Mody Dick does look related - adds another dimension to the failure part.Moody Dick?-nudone (March 24, 2009, 11:09 AM)
