Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Flying Fox, Ryu Connor
Forge wrote:Actually, I've been seeing overly-aggressive memory freeing with Win8. This is bad for me, but good for you. Things that make life better at 2 or 4 GB make me rather unhappy at 16GB on my laptop.
Ryu Connor wrote:Make sure that the SuperFetch service is still turned on. In Win8 it should default to on even if you have an SSD. I'm finding Win8 to be much more agressive at caching with excess memory. 16GB is not an uncommon cache size on my 24GB desktop.
Disco wrote:If you only have 3GB and have no plans to ever add more, then yes you might as well stick with 32bit; as a bonus, the in-place upgrade should be smooth (switching bit-ness means a clean install and migrate, not an in-place upgrade). Frankly I'm amazed that a new 32bit version of Windows exists in 2012, but I guess it exists precisely for uses like yours.My system is 32 bit Vista. I think I'll stick with the 32-bit version. Is there any reason to upgrade to 64-bit? I don't have a lot of RAM (my mistake - it's only 3 GB), and I don't really have any reason to upgrade this machine. It's used casually by the kids for homework and some games.
UberGerbil wrote:as a bonus, the in-place upgrade should be smooth (switching bit-ness means a clean install and migrate, not an in-place upgrade).
ludi wrote:If you run the Win8 upgrade assistant (the only way to purchase and download the $40 Pro upgrade) it will autodetect your current setup and download that version of Win8 without asking. So, if you're running 32-bit Vista, you should end up with the 32-bit version of Windows 8.
If you decide that's NOT what you want, then download it on a 64-bit machine, and then select the option to "Install by creating media" when that option screen appears. It then gives you a choice between creating USB bootable media or burning a DVD ISO. Now you'll have a 64-bit media source, but of course a clean install will be required.
Disco wrote:You can always do the download on that machine and still use the "create install media" option to get a 32bit version you can use for a clean install (possibly with ManManOriginal's caveats). I believe there's still a wizard for migrating "applications and settings" afterwards but I haven't tried using it so I don't know how much control it gives to grab what you want and leave what you don't.Thanks. That's great information. I think I'll give it a try later this week.
Waco wrote:Since when is a Q6600 considered "old" or low end? Windows Vista and 7 happily run on a crapass Intel Atom...I can't imagine Windows 8 is much more resource intensive especially with its more streamlined/threaded kernel.
Forge wrote:I wonder if this is just a change in how things are reported, rather than anything real (much like how they messed around with what was reported for available physical memory on 32bit in 4GB systems). Unless there's pressure from other commits, even aggressively freed memory should be just sitting around with its old contents intact; they have to do work to zero it out and make it truly free memory. Have you tried using Perfmon to see what the page lists look like? Or, more user-friendly, grab RAMMap and use that.Just checked. Superfetch is on, no tinkering done. Makes me sad, though; I just opened the new-and-improved Task Manager, and after a half day of work, I'm showing 3.2GB used/ 12.5GB available, with 3.9GB committed and 2.4GB cached. That's just sad. I have a near-identical Win7 machine that's got 15.9GB used/15.9GB total.
Forge wrote:Low end? I didn't say that. Old, on the other hand? Absolutely. Q6600 was initially released in Q1 2007. That's 5, nearly 6 years ago. There is much newer, faster tech around. That is pretty much the definition of old.