If Vistax64 is such a resource hog,

then why is it mine doesn't use more than half of one core, or more than a third of the memory available?

I have a Quad Core Phenom CPU with 8GB "Mega dual-channel DDR2 800MHz SDRAM" available memory. And yet, even on the internet, it can creep to a halt!

I have "smart deep defragged" my hard drive, regularly clean and defrag my registry, clean and optimize free space, and yet this machine that should lay waste to most anything, can get hung loading Yahoo!

What gives?

The machine is set to let Windows decide whats best for resource use. And I am using the Windows Aero set of display options.

I dual boot Windoze & Linux, but almost never use Windoze for anything. My laptop came with Vista, which I used a couple of weeks before I blew it away and went back to XP. I have heard that if you have a lot of RAM when the OS is installed it will suck up most of it for its own use. It is rumored to relinquish it if needed, but I didn't find that to be exactly true. If you remove most of your RAM, THEN install Vista, it won't take ownership of as much of it when you put your additional RAM back in the machine.
It is not worth it to me to play with it though. I am perfectly content with XP for the rare occasions I use it. Even in VirtualBox, I use XP as opposed to Vista for running BeerSmith and DAQFactory. For everything else, Linux serves my needs just fine.

bull8042 said:

It is rumored to relinquish it if needed, but I didn't find that to be exactly true. If you remove most of your RAM, THEN install Vista, it won't take ownership of as much of it when you put your additional RAM back in the machine.

Click to expand...

Hmmm. Okay. But, I installed the RAM before I ever started the machine. Maybe, this is a condition of the machine running on teh previous 4GB when it was tested.

So, how do I get Vista to utilize more of what is available?

bull8042 said:

I have heard that if you have a lot of RAM when the OS is installed it will suck up most of it for its own use. It is rumored to relinquish it if needed, but I didn't find that to be exactly true. If you remove most of your RAM, THEN install Vista, it won't take ownership of as much of it when you put your additional RAM back in the machine.

Click to expand...

Do you have a source for that info? I don't know for certain, but I can't think of any reason that would be necessary, a good idea, a useful feature, etc. If that were the case, wouldn't you have to reinstall Vista anytime you wanted to add more RAM to your system? I mean, that probably wouldn't happen often, but it'd still be a huge, unnecessary pain in the ass.

bull8042 said:

It is not worth it to me to play with it though. I am perfectly content with XP for the rare occasions I use it. Even in VirtualBox, I use XP as opposed to Vista for running BeerSmith and DAQFactory. For everything else, Linux serves my needs just fine.

Click to expand...

BeerSmith will run just fine using WINE in Linux. No need to even start a virtual machine.

GilaMinumBeer said:

then why is it mine doesn't use more than half of one core, or more than a third of the memory available?

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What are you running when it says this? It might not mean much that it's only using one core. It might not need that much memory either; just because you have it doesn't mean something needs it at the time. Memory use in modern computers is pretty complex and doesn't always make sense when viewed with the usual Windows tools.

Typically, the OS will have a pool of memory that it maintains. When an application needs memory, it requests it from the OS which will allocate it from that pool it's managing. It might look like the OS is using lots of memory, but it may just be managing it to hand out to applications. Whether or not that pool of RAM shows up as in use is up to the tool or OS.

GilaMinumBeer said:

I have "smart deep defragged" my hard drive, regularly clean and defrag my registry, clean and optimize free space, and yet this machine that should lay waste to most anything, can get hung loading Yahoo!

Click to expand...

Does the whole machine hang or just the browser? My first guess would be to turn off Aero or Glass or whatever it's called and see if you have the same problems. It could be that the graphics chipset is the bottleneck in this situation as it's unlikely to be the CPU or RAM.

edit: Have you always had this problem with this machine?

SP2 for Vista just came out. Have you tried that yet?

I think we have a bit of misunderstanding here. What I meant in the above is that Vista wants to lay claim to everything for itself if possible. I didn't mean that you had to reinstall to get it to recognize additional memory, it will use it as needed. What I meant was you had to reinstall after removing memory to get it NOT to try and use it all for itself.

I must have misunderstood the OP. Vista is a resource hog in a big way. Now it seems that his Vista is not utilizing everything his PC has available, which is quite the opposite of my experience. That being said, I don't think I can elaborate any more than I already have.

As for WINE, you are correct, BeerSmith runs fine on that. But I am not going to try and run a real-time data acquisition program communicating via USB in WINE. A hiccup and it could burn up my heater or open the wrong valve and pump my wort onto the floor. WINE is just not mature enough yet. GREAT proggy, but still has a little growing to do.

I <3 Windows 7 Beta!!!
I ran Vista for a year, and then went to Windows 7. It was either that or go back to XP till 7 hits the streets, and i wanted the edge up on learning 7!

Disable the Areo desktop, that alone can use 1GB of ram.....

A fast processor and a lot of fast ram is all good but there are other bottle necks that need to be addressed. Mainly I am talking about the hard drive. What do you have?

I have a 10K raptor drive and have no complaints. On the other hand I wouldn't mind a SCSI 320 drive at 15K either.

Vista's tcp/ip components are crap too. Open a single bit torrent in Vista and you'll lose all net traffic in a short time due to its piss poor way of opening way way way too many ports/sockets.

bull8042 said:

I think we have a bit of misunderstanding here. What I meant in the above is that Vista wants to lay claim to everything for itself if possible. I didn't mean that you had to reinstall to get it to recognize additional memory, it will use it as needed. What I meant was you had to reinstall after removing memory to get it NOT to try and use it all for itself.

Click to expand...

Okay...I see now. It still doesn't make sense to me to reinstall after removing memory, but that doesn't apply to the OP I guess and knowing Microsoft I guess it wouldn't completely surprise me.

bull8042 said:

As for WINE, you are correct, BeerSmith runs fine on that. But I am not going to try and run a real-time data acquisition program communicating via USB in WINE. A hiccup and it could burn up my heater or open the wrong valve and pump my wort onto the floor. WINE is just not mature enough yet. GREAT proggy, but still has a little growing to do.

Click to expand...

Oh, definitely. I was only suggesting it for BeerSmith, but if you're running that along with your data aquisition then yeah, the VM is the way to go.

humann_brewing said:

A fast processor and a lot of fast ram is all good but there are other bottle necks that need to be addressed. Mainly I am talking about the hard drive. What do you have?

I have a 10K raptor drive and have no complaints. On the other hand I wouldn't mind a SCSI 320 drive at 15K either.

Click to expand...

For most "mere mortals" there's no need to even get a 10k drive, let alone a 15k. If the HD is the OP's issue, it's probably an actual problem with the drive/OS itself and almost certainly not fixable by getting a 10 or 15K drive.

yermej said:

For most "mere mortals" there's no need to even get a 10k drive, let alone a 15k. If the HD is the OP's issue, it's probably an actual problem with the drive/OS itself and almost certainly not fixable by getting a 10 or 15K drive.

Click to expand...

Yeah, you have enough machine to run on the Internet. I would suspect the problem lies elsewhere in Network settings or the way the Internet is coming to your house. Have you tried pinging Yahoo to obtain response time and does the machine respond well once the connection is made?

Do you experience the same behavior with Firefox and IE? Here is a link to a support page at Microsoft.

I am basing my resources used off of a Widget.

I do also have the SP2 installed.

Not that this site is very resource needy but, for example, I am using 1% of my CPU. I just started scanning my PC with Norton insight in teh background and I am still only using 25% of my CPU resources. RAM is only 22% used.

I know this is only one example but, I see this pattern with everything.

I have had this type issue since I bought the computer particularly when multitasking. If i try to multitask, for example, scheduled scans in teh background, more often than not the machine hangs.

The only reference I have on my internet performance (Cox cable) is the thread where I ran the test. IIRC, mine was above average performance.

Many times, the machine will hang and I cannot even get access to the task manager to end the program running. This happens with internet too.

I tend to get the "Program Not Responding" prompt a lot more than I care too.

My harddrive is whatever HP has in this machine. It's generically listed as a WDC WD64 00AAKS-65A7B SCSI.

The CPU is the AMD Phenom 9650 Quad-Core 2.30 GHz. The hard drive is 640GB at 7200rpm. The video chipset is 128mb Nvidia. It is a HP Pavillion Elite.

Any other suggestions?

Does Vista have a paging file? I have XP, and I turned my paging file off because I have 2 GB of RAM and don't need the OS accessing the hard drive to use for memory applications.

I had problems like you described last week, and some indexes somewhere were corrupted. Running chkdsk /R on bootup fixed it.

If this has been going on since you bought the machine and it's pretty much locking up the whole machine (particularly since you can't even access Task Manager), I'm suspecting a hardware problem, possibly bad or mis-seated RAM.

I would first make sure the RAM is installed correctly on the board and shows up properly in the BIOS (make sure the full amount shows and the speed/other info looks reasonable). After that, download and burn Memtest86+ (you want the pre-compiled bootable ISO .zip) to a CD. Boot from that CD and run the tests. I think it's pretty self-explanatory, but post again if there are questions.

yermej said:

If this has been going on since you bought the machine and it's pretty much locking up the whole machine (particularly since you can't even access Task Manager), I'm suspecting a hardware problem, possibly bad or mis-seated RAM.

I would first make sure the RAM is installed correctly on the board and shows up properly in the BIOS (make sure the full amount shows and the speed/other info looks reasonable). After that, download and burn Memtest86+ (you want the pre-compiled bootable ISO .zip) to a CD. Boot from that CD and run the tests. I think it's pretty self-explanatory, but post again if there are questions.

Click to expand...

I have checked the bios, all the memory does how up in the proper quantity. I have also ran diagnostics and the memory chipset are working perfectly. All the chips are matched by brand, size, and clock speed and are approved by the PC manufacturer.

I will try the third party test application you suggest but, I don't think there is a hardware issue. This machine runs diagnostic checks frequently (scheduled for late night/early morning runs when the machine is not in use).

I have exhausted checks for potential software incompatibilities and everything appears to cjeck out. But, I am thinking there may be an issue there too. I have turned off all the known, un-needed processes (Adobe Quicklaunch, etc...) in an attempt to troubleshoot.

I may have to check the previous suggestion. I know I have Windows set to manage the resources at it's will and I am pretty sure it has a default page size which may be why the pc is not utilizing the available memory. I'll also try the chkdsk suggestion to see if there is an indexing issue.

Vista has even noted the lack of machine response and has one of those troubleshooting "tickets" but, I never see any suggestions to the problems via that service.

GilaMinumBeer said:

then why is it mine doesn't use more than half of one core, or more than a third of the memory available?

Click to expand...

Core usage is average.. during peaks you may load all of the cores, but most of the time your CPU will be idle. I have a quad core CPU and my average utilization is under 2% even while playing MP3s and typing to you dudes.

As for memory, programs only use what they need so adding more RAM to a system that doesn't need it won't speed things up. Over time your memory usage will increase as the system uses the idle memory pages to cache data from your hard drive, but that's it. Even for a hog like Vista over 2G of RAM simply isn't necessary unless you are running Photoshop or some other big app which needs lots of RAM to do its work.

GilaMinumBeer said:

I tend to get the "Program Not Responding" prompt a lot more than I care too.

Click to expand...

Sounds like a buggy program to me. When you get this prompt what programs are 'not responding'? You may need to update your software esp. browser plugins. If it is anything at all at random times, and there is no set pattern to it, you may have spyware or a virus which is hijacking your system resources. Virus scanners don't always pick it up so you have to take your system to someone who can do an offline scan of your hard drive to determine if it's infected.

Buggy software is more likely. Figuring out what programs are not responding in task manager will narrow it down.

Saccharomyces said:

Core usage is average.. during peaks you may load all of the cores, but most of the time your CPU will be idle. I have a quad core CPU and my average utilization is under 2% even while playing MP3s and typing to you dudes.

As for memory, programs only use what they need so adding more RAM to a system that doesn't need it won't speed things up. Over time your memory usage will increase as the system uses the idle memory pages to cache data from your hard drive, but that's it. Even for a hog like Vista over 2G of RAM simply isn't necessary unless you are running Photoshop or some other big app which needs lots of RAM to do its work.

Click to expand...

Okay. Good news. I did up the RAm because I had PS CS2 on the previous machine but I could not get the bootleg x-ferred. I also ran AutoCAD on the old machine but it won't install on this one due to athe 16 bit installers incompatibility.

I do use another photo-processing application (RAW image manipulation and batch conversions to JPEG) and even then, the max RAM I have seen used is 50%. Of course the CPU usage pegs all over the place. Perhaps I am just mis-understanding how memory intensive applications can be. But, I suppose it's better to have more than you need than not enough eh?

Any input on the hang ups?

Saccharomyces said:

Sounds like a buggy program to me. When you get this prompt what programs are 'not responding'? You may need to update your software esp. browser plugins. If it is anything at all at random times, and there is no set pattern to it, you may have spyware or a virus which is hijacking your system resources. Virus scanners don't always pick it up so you have to take your system to someone who can do an offline scan of your hard drive to determine if it's infected.

Buggy software is more likely. Figuring out what programs are not responding in task manager will narrow it down.

Click to expand...

Ahh. Beat me to it. Ironically, it's usually IE 8 that locks. However, Norton 360 is integrated into my browser a few different ways (password vault, site security, etc...). Perhaps I should tryu turning those off and see if the situation resolves itself.

GilaMinumBeer said:

Ahh. Beat me to it. Ironically, it's usually IE 8 that locks. However, Norton 360 is integrated into my browser a few different ways (password vault, site security, etc...). Perhaps I should tryu turning those off and see if the situation resolves itself.

Click to expand...

My bet is browser plugin. I don't have IE8 as I'm on XP but in IE7 I would go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced tab, and Reset Internet Explorer Settings. This will disable all browser add-ons. Then go re-install all your plugins like Java, Shockwave, Flash, etc. with the latest. Don't use any of the 'toolbar' craplets those things are notoriously buggy as hell. My money is that if you do this you'll be golden. It's quite possible you picked up some Adware somewhere which installs as a browser plugin and that is causing your problems... my experience with Adware detection software is that it simply doesn't work, there are 100,000 pieces of adware and the detectors only know how to find at most 10% of them.

If you still have problems after doing all that I would try reinstalling and re-updating Norton AV.

GilaMinumBeer said:

I do use another photo-processing application (RAW image manipulation and batch conversions to JPEG) and even then, the max RAM I have seen used is 50%. Of course the CPU usage pegs all over the place. Perhaps I am just mis-understanding how memory intensive applications can be. But, I suppose it's better to have more than you need than not enough eh?

Click to expand...

Yeah.

One thing about the paging file... I don't recommend turning it off, it can only hurt to turn it off.

Windows memory manager will use the paging file even if you have some RAM free. Reason is simple -- it keeps frequently accessed pages in memory and moves stuff to the paging file that hasn't been used in awhile. If you disable paging it can only reuse pages which are file cache even if those are accessed more frequently than idle app data (like those toolbar apps you don't use...). Having the paging file allows the memory manager to keep the most frequently accessed pages in RAM regardless of what they are (disk or app data). Just because the paging file is in use doesn't mean the data will have to be read in from disk -- typically there is a copy of that data still in RAM, it's just first in line to get whacked if some app decides it is hungry for more memory.

The Sysinternals book doesn't give details of large pages since that is a newer feature but I suspect disabling paging will also reduce the amount of large pages available in the system which could further slow down apps which use them.

Thanks for the suggestions. Looks like I have a busy night ahead.