TL;DR-- skip to bottom image
If I recall in the Vista days Microsoft pre-emptively told DDR2 mem manufacturers to spin up production in expectation of future demand-- Vista was going to take a lot of RAM.
Then the 2008 recession hit and people weren't upgrading their PCs like expected. Excessive capacity and supply in the line, hence DDR2 prices dropped like a rock. I remember buying DDR2 2GB sticks for $20.
There was also an outcry again Microsoft over the system resources used in Vista.
One of the fusses was the RAM requirement.
In Vista days, it mirrored the VRAM on the dedicated video card for integrity purposes because of something related to desktop compositing.
In Windows 7, this was supposed to be removed.
My personal theory is this and other features that slowed Vista down so much, were removed and then patched back in to Windows 7.
I'm running SP1 and don't have an option to check an OEM non-SP1 installation of Windows 7 so all I can say is, my netbook was usable with a fresh Win7 install. When I patched it up, it became super slow-- there was a search indexing function that would run on log in, every log in, that was patched back in that wasn't there on the stock Windows 7 install. I didn't have the energy or care to bother tracking it down, I simply uninstalled all the updates and continued enjoying a usable netbook.
Now, I have hit a wall: 7 seems to still be mirroring the VRAM from the video card, and then some. I thought this had been removed; maybe it was; maybe it never was. Regardless, I want the RAM back. This was one of the reasons I had to upgrade my previous rig-- I had 8GB RAM and between Chrome taking up more resources, and switching to an AMD graphics card (didn't have this problem on Nvidia or so I recall) I began abruptly (as in, never before the card swap/upgrade) hitting OOM errors in Windows (I run with the Swap file disabled on purpose) (NO, THIS IS PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE, IF YOU THINK OTHERWISE YOU [ARE AN IDIOT] DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW SWAP AND VIRTUAL MEMORY WORK. THE PROGRAM CAN'T TELL IF IT'S USING VIRTUAL MEMORY OR RAM) at 6GB, after having previously been able to push all the way up to 7.8GB of RAM used (launching every program and game that I have installed, ever) without OOM issues.
Part of me thinks it's something specific to AMD graphics drivers in typical [by the way, I am an AMD fanboy] AMD fashion where it "gets the job done" but is not cleanly implemented or what one would call stable IE is not 'confidence inspiring' in the same way that NVidia's drivers have been (ignoring their marketing evilness).
Frankly, I don't think anyone here is smart or knowledgeable enough to figure this out/solve, but I figured I'd post anyways before I copy-paste it to sevenforums where the real pros reside.
What I'm trying to get rid of is this 3840MB of RAM that's being nefariously stolen from me for no legitimately necessary reason. BTW-- why is it 3840MB? That's like 4k resolution. This is fishy.
If I recall in the Vista days Microsoft pre-emptively told DDR2 mem manufacturers to spin up production in expectation of future demand-- Vista was going to take a lot of RAM.
Then the 2008 recession hit and people weren't upgrading their PCs like expected. Excessive capacity and supply in the line, hence DDR2 prices dropped like a rock. I remember buying DDR2 2GB sticks for $20.
There was also an outcry again Microsoft over the system resources used in Vista.
One of the fusses was the RAM requirement.
In Vista days, it mirrored the VRAM on the dedicated video card for integrity purposes because of something related to desktop compositing.
In Windows 7, this was supposed to be removed.
My personal theory is this and other features that slowed Vista down so much, were removed and then patched back in to Windows 7.
I'm running SP1 and don't have an option to check an OEM non-SP1 installation of Windows 7 so all I can say is, my netbook was usable with a fresh Win7 install. When I patched it up, it became super slow-- there was a search indexing function that would run on log in, every log in, that was patched back in that wasn't there on the stock Windows 7 install. I didn't have the energy or care to bother tracking it down, I simply uninstalled all the updates and continued enjoying a usable netbook.
Now, I have hit a wall: 7 seems to still be mirroring the VRAM from the video card, and then some. I thought this had been removed; maybe it was; maybe it never was. Regardless, I want the RAM back. This was one of the reasons I had to upgrade my previous rig-- I had 8GB RAM and between Chrome taking up more resources, and switching to an AMD graphics card (didn't have this problem on Nvidia or so I recall) I began abruptly (as in, never before the card swap/upgrade) hitting OOM errors in Windows (I run with the Swap file disabled on purpose) (NO, THIS IS PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE, IF YOU THINK OTHERWISE YOU [ARE AN IDIOT] DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW SWAP AND VIRTUAL MEMORY WORK. THE PROGRAM CAN'T TELL IF IT'S USING VIRTUAL MEMORY OR RAM) at 6GB, after having previously been able to push all the way up to 7.8GB of RAM used (launching every program and game that I have installed, ever) without OOM issues.
Part of me thinks it's something specific to AMD graphics drivers in typical [by the way, I am an AMD fanboy] AMD fashion where it "gets the job done" but is not cleanly implemented or what one would call stable IE is not 'confidence inspiring' in the same way that NVidia's drivers have been (ignoring their marketing evilness).
Frankly, I don't think anyone here is smart or knowledgeable enough to figure this out/solve, but I figured I'd post anyways before I copy-paste it to sevenforums where the real pros reside.
What I'm trying to get rid of is this 3840MB of RAM that's being nefariously stolen from me for no legitimately necessary reason. BTW-- why is it 3840MB? That's like 4k resolution. This is fishy.
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