Vista hurdles

When I bought a new PC -a great one in my opinion 4gig of ram, 3ghz core duo 2 and an NVidia Geforce 8800 GTX card - it only seemed natural to get VISTA with it.
Afterall VISTA had been out for a while, most bugs were squashed and I'd be getting vista sooner or later anyway, so why go through reinstalling twice.

So vista 32bit was installed, and it is true. It is a WAUW experience. It's absolutely gorgeous.
Of course there were tweaks to be done to get most out of it...


But on to the not-so-good stuff.
The first annoyance to be found was that it was only recognizing 3 out of the 4gigs of RAM installed.
I put my husband and his friend - they're both IT proffessionals - on a mission to solve this mystery. They couldn't. One of them even insisted the motherboard was faulty...

After alot of reading and testing I found out that apparently the system reserves one gig for hardware whenever you have more than 2gig.
So... I physically have 4gig, but only have 3available, ok well, no biggie.
This by the way can be turned off, but is not reccomended, so... no.


The next major concern came when I was checking out the task manager, 11mb free ram?! WHAT?!!

No way...! I was always running alot more programs on XP without problems than I am now on vista WITH memory problems.

We found the source. A program called Superfetch. Disabling that stopped the memory from appearing to leak...
Problem solved.

Or so I thought.

I've been getting memory errors particularly from heavy graphic games and programs, that's just not right with 3gig of memory. I was pissed.
My pagefile is big enough, so it can't be that.
Put my husband on a mission to solving this mystery too, I was certain there had to be a leak somewhere still. Using between 16-25% of the physical memory before me even starting anything big was just not OK in my mind...

I still can't get it to go lower than 18% before opening things, but I have been doing research on vista and pagefiling and I found out what superfetch is.
It's an all new memory management feature, never seen in Windows before.
It is SUPPOSED to hog all the memory.
What it does is it fills up the cache and over time remembers how you use your PC, which programs you run and when. It'll even remember if you have preferences on what programs you use on certain weekdays, but anyway...
It is not a BAD thing when superfetch is running to only have 10mb free, because the memory that it caches is in theory still available for use, it will just drop some of the cached things when you open up something new.

In the beginning this process will be slow, but overtime as it learns how you use the computer, it will be faster because the PC will have already preloaded the programs it assumes you will use.
How clever is that?

Admittedly it is not very clever of Microsoft to not point this out specifically. Alot of people have been disabling superfetch thinking it was the cause of a memory leak...
But the idea is good though.
I have turned it back on, and will leave it running for a few weeks to see if my memory errors will be cleared up now.

I pray it will, or I'll just have to hope they get done fixing up 64bit soon so I can get that instead, aswell as some more RAM.