64-bit OS with 2GB RAM

[newtekie1]

My install is one week old today. Basically I only have drivers and a few games installed. Right now, it is sitting around 1.2 GiB. There's 38 processes running. This is a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

I haven't even had a chance to tweak it yet, hell I haven't even turned off the Indexer yet, as you can see from the picture.

I'm never amazed at how quickly people can bloat up their machine though, a week is plenty of time to install a few memory hogs, especially if you have a bunch of programs that you like that you install right away with a fresh install, there are a lot of them out there that are useful but take up a lot of memory in the background. Though with only 38 processes....I've got 48 running and are using less memory than you claim to be...

Edit:

A quick trip down Black Viper's services tweak list and I'm under 590MB with 47 Processes:

 

[FordGT90Concept]

You got 2 GiB of RAM, I have 6. Mine is caching (or reserved memory for caching) twice as much as yours. Windows XP x64 only took about 100-150 MiB of RAM but 200-300 MiB on top of that was for caching.


When people say extra RAM makes their computer "feel" faster is because of caching. When you don't have enough RAM, less is cached leading to a decreased response time. XP x64 (which caches at least twice as much as XP, assuming XP caches at all) is commonly described as being more responsive. It has nothing to do with x64 and everything to do with Windows 5.2 compared to 5.1.


I restarted and it was 800 some MiB RAM used which since climbed to ~1 GiB. BOINC auto-starts so a lot of that 800 MiB could be the BOINC projects being cached.


The point remains: Windows XP x64 requires less RAM to get optimal performance than Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

 

[erocker]

I'm currently using Windows 7 x64 w/ 2gb's DDR 400 and an old single core athlon. It works absolutely fine. Smooth one might say.

That being said if you want to be doing video encoding or other intensive tasks, your current machine will be slow (but functional) no matter what O/S you are using.

Here's a screenshot. (funny I don't remember turning cool and quiet on. I never thought it worked with this board! Awesome!)

 

[suraswami]

Go with x64 now, you've already got the copy so just use it.

Despite what some say, it does not take up a huge amount of memory off the bat. A fresh install of Win7 x64 w/ AVG Anti-virus and Aero enabled only uses about 650MB of RAM. Thats without any tweaks to lower memory usage, just a plain install of Win7 Pro.

I don't know where people are getting that it will use over 1GB of RAM right off the bat, it won't. Maybe some of the copies from OEMs like Dell and HP will use 1GB+, but those are bloated right from the beginning with crapware.

To give you an idea, the machine I'm typing this on right now is a Pentium D w/ 2GB of RAM, and Win7 x64 runs extremely smooth on it.

I totally agree with newtekie1 here. I am running AII X2 240 @3.5Ghz with just 2GB Ram and W7 64bit Professional. I do game on this with my new 4670 @ 1920 x 1080 medium settings (MOH Airborne) and the ram usage never went over 1.7GB. Alt+tab works just fine, I can run the game in the background and still open up other apps with no lag.

I'm going to take your advice since there does not seem to be a clear conclusion to draw. It will always depend on hardware / usage to a large extent I guess.

FWIW, Microsoft Security Essentials Antivirus (MSEA) runs better than AVG which I recently dropped after 4 years of Happiness on both Windows Vista and Windows 7. On the computer in question I have MSEA and works good.

The only way I'm going to really "know" is to go 64-bit now. I posed the question here because I didn't want to setup EVERYTHING on 32-bit, only to have to do it again with 64-bit.

One final thing I will note - and will need to take care off - is the onboard sound card driver. This was the only trouble I had with my Windows 7 install. After hunting on the net, I finally managed the courage to take the suggestion of trying Windows XP driver on Windows 7. It does work. Now after I put 64-bit Windows 7 on the machine, I will have to go find the 64-bit XP driver for the sound card. If that does not work, then I'll have to go back to 32-bit for all the wrong reasons. Surely cannot live with sound not working.

Thank you, one and all.

Make sure you go with atleast Win 7 64bit Professional so you can make use of running any old hardware drivers in XP mode. The sound drivers should install fine in XP compatibility mode and will work fine. If you go with Home premium or something you are on your own

Or you can get a cheap $15 via chipset sound card, via have drivers for 7 32 and 64bit. Usually Realtek onboard should be taken care of 7 without any drivers need to be installed.

 

[newtekie1]

You got 2 GiB of RAM, I have 6. Mine is caching (or reserved memory for caching) twice as much as yours. Windows XP x64 only took about 100-150 MiB of RAM but 200-300 MiB on top of that was for caching.


When people say extra RAM makes their computer "feel" faster is because of caching. When you don't have enough RAM, less is cached leading to a decreased response time. XP x64 (which caches at least twice as much as XP, assuming XP caches at all) is commonly described as being more responsive. It has nothing to do with x64 and everything to do with Windows 5.2 compared to 5.1.


I restarted and it was 800 some MiB RAM used which since climbed to ~1 GiB. BOINC auto-starts so a lot of that 800 MiB could be the BOINC projects being cached.


The point remains: Windows XP x64 requires less RAM to get optimal performance than Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

A fully updated XP x64, fresh with just AVG again, uses IIRC ~500MB without caching. You can actually see how much is actually being used by caching in my screenshots, almost 1GB. But RAM used for caching is hardly used RAM, since whatever is in it, can just be dumped instantly if the RAM is needed vs. swapping out to the HD with traditional RAM usage.

I would agree that XP x64 requires less RAM if we were talking a few years ago, but all the bloated updates have made it barely usable on 512MB of RAM, and just about as usable on 1GB as Win7 is. In fact, Win7 is actually pretty functional on 512MB, sluggish as XP but functional.

 

[TripleDesi]

Windows 7 64-bit installed

I'm glad I installed Windows 7 64-bit. First of all it would seem MS is giving you subtle hints and pushing you to 64-bit. When I went to Windows Update to install all updates not only did it not find more updates in one shot, it rebooted only once. And the onboard audio driver I had to go and manually install - it was found on Windows Update unlike when I installed 32-bit.

The attached screenshot shows I have no complaints. I didn't tweak anything at all. The only thing. I installed besides OS and all updates is Microsoft Security Essentials.

I will now work toward figuring out what RAM to buy.

Thanks all.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I would agree that XP x64 requires less RAM if we were talking a few years ago, but all the bloated updates have made it barely usable on 512MB of RAM, and just about as usable on 1GB as Win7 is. In fact, Win7 is actually pretty functional on 512MB, sluggish as XP but functional.

Not true. When I first installed it in 2005 through today, it only uses about 450 MiB. XP x64 runs fine on 512 MiB as well because the true memory footprint is only 150-200 MiB (not much larger than XP).

 

[newtekie1]

Not true. When I first installed it in 2005 through today, it only uses about 450 MiB. XP x64 runs fine on 512 MiB as well because the true memory footprint is only 150-200 MiB (not much larger than XP).

Regular XP now uses almost 512MB alone, well it is closer to about 350MB, without caching, it is no where near 150-200MB even with tweaking. The x64 edition is no different, in fact it is slightly worse, as you point out.

 

[theonedub]

My 965 runs Win7x64 with 2gb of ram just fine.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I don't have an XP x64 install anymore. Here's the next best thing:

Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard x64 Edition w/ 8 GiB using 925 MiB (211 hotfixes):

DNS (uses almost 100 MiB by itself), Active Directory, IIS, file sharing, DDNSUS, and other services are running.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit w/ 6 GiB using 930 MiB (10 hotfixes):

And for reference:

Windows XP Professional w/ 3 GiB using 380 MiB (177 hotfixes):

World Community Grid is running.

 

[Mussels]

XP x64 is on the same update cycle as Server 2003. They both still get updates rather frquently (was one today).



If you got the RAM, XP x64 is the fastest of those four in most tasks.



There's only three reasons why a game won't work on XP x64:

1) The game installs drivers (namely, Star-Force) which are not 64-bit compatible so it errors. It doesn't matter it is XP x64, Vista 64-bit, or 7 64-bit, install wll fail on all. Examples: Beyond Good & Evil, XIII, and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. This is infrequent and unheard of for new/recent titles.

2) The game only has a Direct3D 10 render path. XP x64 does not have D3D 10 support so they obviously will fail to run. Examples: Stormrise and Dirt 2. Not many major titles fit here but a trend may be starting.

3) Blacklists where, for whatever reason, the developer forbids the application to be installed on any OS except a select few. Examples: Shadowrun and Halo 2. Very rare.

you just listed 7 games that wont run, off the top of your head. You kinda made my point for me

 

[CounterZeus]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/newtekie1/Win7memoryusage1.png

I haven't even had a chance to tweak it yet, hell I haven't even turned off the Indexer yet, as you can see from the picture.

I'm never amazed at how quickly people can bloat up their machine though, a week is plenty of time to install a few memory hogs, especially if you have a bunch of programs that you like that you install right away with a fresh install, there are a lot of them out there that are useful but take up a lot of memory in the background. Though with only 38 processes....I've got 48 running and are using less memory than you claim to be...

Edit:

A quick trip down Black Viper's services tweak list and I'm under 590MB with 47 Processes:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/newtekie1/win7memoryusage2.png

off topic:
hey, unfair, how come your cpu is listed with the right frequency? My pentium D is running @3.2GHz and shows up as 1.5GHz...

on topic:
a friend of mine, his old gaming laptop with 2 GiB RAM is running win7 64-bit with no problems, just a few driver issues with older games, but that has nothing to do with the RAM ^-^

 

[Solaris17]

Just to clarify what these guys are saying:

If you plan to upgrade the ram, definitely go x64 now. 64 bit doesn't have any real downside over 32 bit, so go x64 from the start.

However, be aware that 2GB is the minimum you want to run with vista (its decent for 7). So try and do the upgrade to 4GB ASAP

Also, XP 64 is basically unsupported and has many issues with games. Despite its lower memory footprint, you'll definitely run into hardware and software compatibility problems.

agreed if you tweak vista and 7 both will get incrdably low ram usage. i think im down to like 700m idle on one of my machines. win 7 is a little more forgiving ith ram than vista. windows XP x64 was probably my bigest WTF heartache. iv never seen so much support failure in my life. that OS just did not want to work on several different occasions.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

you just listed 7 games that wont run, off the top of your head. You kinda made my point for me

Three of them wouldn't work on any 64-bit operating system, two were the result of a one-time Microsoft experiment three years ago, and the remain two aren't anything to write home about (except to complain about Stormrise's ridiculously stupid control system).

 

[shevanel]

i tried xp 64.. terrible driver support.

 

[TripleDesi]

agreed if you tweak vista and 7 both will get incrdably low ram usage. i think im down to like 700m idle on one of my machines. win 7 is a little more forgiving ith ram than vista. windows XP x64 was probably my bigest WTF heartache. iv never seen so much support failure in my life. that OS just did not want to work on several different occasions.

Any insights into tweaking Windows 7 on startup? I'm hoping some free tool out there that guides n00bs like me and prevents us from messing up the install by mucking around the registry.

 

[Solaris17]

Any insights into tweaking Windows 7 on startup? I'm hoping some free tool out there that guides n00bs like me and prevents us from messing up the install by mucking around the registry.

welll you can manipulate whats starts with windows if thats what your asking. um i can find the guide. one of the most important things to remember though. Is that the startup/services entries need to be maintained regularly. because software you install adds to these lists. and eventually slowely degrade performance. things like itunes java adobe all of which will start with the PC automatically in the background. Iv come to find that services and startup items such as these are installed with most of todays software and disabling them has no adverse affect on the program itself and helps with system performance. things such as adobe's reader etc will work perfect when manually opeing a PDF or a similar adobe file the program will auto start. the same goes for programs such as open office which installs a "quick start" allowing tings like OO wrighter etc to open aster when clicked on. However disabling these services dont break the programs themselves. (for example if you disable openoffices quick start the program and files work fine just start a little slower). i will find the guide for the tweaks. but just remember alot of the stuff comes from you and not windows.

 

[Deleted member 3]

Of course you don't. But WOW64 uses resources, and should add latency in being what it is - a translation layer.

So? Modern PC's have plenty of resources, I consider using them to aid reliability a good thing.

 

[Rexter]

Have all of you collectivly forgotten how vista and win7 uses ram? oh wow so it uses 900mb during idle. Its chaching! As soon as you open a program that need the ram it free's it!

Its called superfetch or something, i forgot its proper name but its something like that. You cant compare AT ALL the memory usage of win7 and winXP.


Anyway, ive had many kinds of OS' with my current setup you can see to the left <--- and win7 64bit is definetly the one im most satisfied with. And you just dont get the benefit of using more than 4gb ram, because with a 64bit OS, the kernel, the drivers, everything in the core of the system runs at 64bit, which is theoretically faster than the 32bit kernel. It just feels faster in every way.

And in regard to tweaking the boot process, YOU DONT NEED IT! For the love of god dont use any third party programs! Just defrag your harddrive, make sure there's not any stupid programs that opens up at startup. thats it.

 

[TripleDesi]

Tweaking Windows 7

i will find the guide for the tweaks. but just remember alot of the stuff comes from you and not windows.

I hear you. As I've said I'm learning everyday. For instance, I just switched from wireless mouse and keyboard to my KVM switch which uses old style PS2 keyboard and mouse. Needless to say it has nothing to do with KVM switch, but rather, the wireless mouse and keyboard and / or the fact that the adapter used USB for the keyboard. Some driver does not seem to be loading because I just reclaimed 200MB from startup memory. I did this 3 times, switching back and forth so I'm certain.

This only makes what you said more sense. One can start with some guidelines but ultimately you have to be fickle enough to figure out what works best for you. One day at a time.

 

[newtekie1]

I don't have an XP x64 install anymore. Here's the next best thing:

Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard x64 Edition w/ 8 GiB using 925 MiB (211 hotfixes):
http://img.techpowerup.org/100123/server.jpg
DNS (uses almost 100 MiB by itself), Active Directory, IIS, file sharing, DDNSUS, and other services are running.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit w/ 6 GiB using 930 MiB (10 hotfixes):
http://img.techpowerup.org/100123/by-2009.jpg


And for reference:

Windows XP Professional w/ 3 GiB using 380 MiB (177 hotfixes):
http://img.techpowerup.org/100123/by-2008.jpg
World Community Grid is running.

How did you manage to get Win7 to use 930MB with Aero off? I don't see much that stands out on your task list, a real head scratcher, of course there are a bunch of services that all run under the same svchost names that might be part of the problem, so I guess if you have some other features enabled that aren't enabled by default it would make sense. Maybe it is just Ultimate with its few extra features that make it naturally use more memory than Professional edition. Of course there is always the fact that Win7 is more efficient with using the page file, and with only 2GB it tends to use it more than systems with 4+GB, making the amount of used memory seem lower on systems with less memory.

Oh well, it is really odd. I will conceed that XP(and XP x64) do have a slightly smaller memory footprint, but the differenece(about 200-300MB) is marginal on a system with more than 1GB of RAM, and really not worth giving up the features, compatibility, and security that comes with Win7 over XP.

you just listed 7 games that wont run, off the top of your head. You kinda made my point for me

Three of them wouldn't work on any 64-bit operating system, two were the result of a one-time Microsoft experiment three years ago, and the remain two aren't anything to write home about (except to complain about Stormrise's ridiculously stupid control system).

To be fair, the starforce games will work after you go to starforce's site and download the 64-bit drivers, except the really old games that still use version 3.05 of earlier, but starforce left that up to the game developer to update the copy protection via a patch to the never version for free. Of course that assumes the developer is still in business.

off topic:
hey, unfair, how come your cpu is listed with the right frequency? My pentium D is running @3.2GHz and shows up as 1.5GHz...

on topic:
a friend of mine, his old gaming laptop with 2 GiB RAM is running win7 64-bit with no problems, just a few driver issues with older games, but that has nothing to do with the RAM ^-^

I turn off Speedstep/C1E in the BIOS and all the power saving features in the OS.

Have all of you collectivly forgotten how vista and win7 uses ram? oh wow so it uses 900mb during idle. Its chaching! As soon as you open a program that need the ram it free's it!

Its called superfetch or something, i forgot its proper name but its something like that. You cant compare AT ALL the memory usage of win7 and winXP.


Anyway, ive had many kinds of OS' with my current setup you can see to the left <--- and win7 64bit is definetly the one im most satisfied with. And you just dont get the benefit of using more than 4gb ram, because with a 64bit OS, the kernel, the drivers, everything in the core of the system runs at 64bit, which is theoretically faster than the 32bit kernel. It just feels faster in every way.

And in regard to tweaking the boot process, YOU DONT NEED IT! For the love of god dont use any third party programs! Just defrag your harddrive, make sure there's not any stupid programs that opens up at startup. thats it.

We went over how Win7 and Vista use RAM, you can see in my screenshots the caching part, I'm not including that in my numbers, just the actual used RAM.

And if you want to tweak your startup, I usually use Black Viper's services guide found here: http://www.blackviper.com/Windows_7/servicecfg.htm

I generally just go down the "safe" column, and anything marked with an * I change to what he says to change it to. Doesn't take long at all to do.

It isn't "needed" but it helps, as I showed earlier in the thread, shaving about 100MB off my memory usage with not real side effect to the average user. And for the ~5 Min it takes to do it, it is worth it IMO.

 

[jjFarking]

Look mate. In short, it comes down to just getting the go-ahead on x64.
Install it & enjoy it. Get more RAM when you can afford to and see how you go performance/speed wise.
If, somewhere down the track, you find it's not as responsive as you'd like it to be, then you can look at maybe optimising services et cetera.

Go 64

 

[FordGT90Concept]

To be fair, the starforce games will work after you go to starforce's site and download the 64-bit drivers, except the really old games that still use version 3.05 of earlier, but starforce left that up to the game developer to update the copy protection via a patch to the never version for free. Of course that assumes the developer is still in business.

The installer will halt/error/fail/CTD when it attempts to install a 32-bit driver on a 64-bit machine. I suppose you could install it via Windows XP Mode, copy the files over to Windows 7, install the 64-bit Star-Force driver, and it should theoretically work. Either way, it is still a pain.

 

[newtekie1]

The installer will halt/error/fail/CTD when it attempts to install a 32-bit driver on a 64-bit machine. I suppose you could install it via Windows XP Mode, copy the files over to Windows 7, install the 64-bit Star-Force driver, and it should theoretically work. Either way, it is still a pain.

Every starforce game I've installed won't halt, it will actually install the driver, but you have to disable driver signing first I believe. Of course if you reboot after installing the 32-bit driver, Windows won't start again in normal mode until you go in and remove the 32-bit driver.(Starforce even warns about this on their website.)

 

[FordGT90Concept]

How did you manage to get Win7 to use 930MB with Aero off? I don't see much that stands out on your task list, a real head scratcher, of course there are a bunch of services that all run under the same svchost names that might be part of the problem, so I guess if you have some other features enabled that aren't enabled by default it would make sense. Maybe it is just Ultimate with its few extra features that make it naturally use more memory than Professional edition. Of course there is always the fact that Win7 is more efficient with using the page file, and with only 2GB it tends to use it more than systems with 4+GB, making the amount of used memory seem lower on systems with less memory.

There are a lot of running services. I have not modified the list:
http://img.techpowerup.org/100123/services.png

...really not worth giving up the features, compatibility, and security that comes with Win7 over XP.

That's debatable. In short: I've had no security problems on XP x64. Vista/7 have no new features I care for. Vista/7 64-bit suffer the same backwards compatibility issues XP x64 does.

Every starforce game I've installed won't halt, it will actually install the driver, but you have to disable driver signing first I believe. Of course if you reboot after installing the 32-bit driver, Windows won't start again in normal mode until you go in and remove the 32-bit driver.(Starforce even warns about this on their website.)

Beyond Good & Evil just closed without message or warning once it gets to the Star-Force part on an x64 OS. In XP Mode, it installs fine but fails to run because of no Direct3D support. On an 32-bit XP machine, it installs and plays just fine. I think it works on 32-bit Vista and 7 as well.