Vista's "Dark Memory"?


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Well I installed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. under Vista (8800GTX + Opteron 175@2.75 + 2GB DDR500@250Mhz). Everything is maxed out, the game flies. I'm using Nvidia beta 101.41 drivers and the latest beta drivers for Xi-Fi, and the game works perfect, really smooth. Now, I have superfetch and windows search disabled. Whoever said that by disabling superfetch you will lose performance, it's lying to you big time. Superfetch is totally safe to disable. Instead of letting system prefetching things, and since i'm in control of OS and not OS/computer in control over me, I decide when and what i'm going to load. Brandon, and the others...if you can't understand that, we are just wasting time talking about it.

As far as Windows Search i don't see any benefits of having it enabled. Why? After you disable windows search, then you have regular search like in windows xp. Well, my raid raptor configuration is just damn fast that there is no time difference in finding file with or without windows search. As far as I'm concern just another useless service. I'm pretty sure you can see the benefits of windows search if you have like 500GB of music, movies, and software....but i'm sorry i don't have that much of data.

The problem with Windows Vista and any prior Windows versions is that you can't customize it in order to fit your needs. I always liked Linux installation process where you can select each component except the ones needed for OS to run propertly.

How hard would be for Microsoft to have two installation options. Recommended and Custom. With recommended the installation process is like we have it now, but with Custom you can select or deselect Windows components such as WMP11, Windows Defender, ReadyBoost, Windows Search, Superfetch, Security Center, IE7.0, Tablet PC, Media Center etc etc...

Could not agree more :D

You have the same same experience as me: a tweaked system is better in every aspect than the default vista install.

But we are somewhat lucky: Vlite and Vista manager helps a lot to slim down vista and to disable for example superfetch helps s lot .

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Superfetch is totally safe to disable. Instead of letting system prefetching things, and since i'm in control of OS and not OS/computer in control over me, I decide when and what i'm going to load. Brandon, and the others...if you can't understand that, we are just wasting time talking about it.

It's safe to disable, you'll just be reducing your system's performance, especially on a high-memory system. That's like saying you're going to disable your CPU cache because you decide what's important to your CPU and not the CPU itself. It doesn't make any sense.

As for Windows Search, searching against just filenames on NTFS is going to always be pretty fast regardless of whether the drive/directory is indexed. On the other hand, if you're searching within file contents the amount of time it's going to take is exponentially higher (something that takes 1 second against the index will often take several minutes using grep). Other operations just aren't possible or won't work right, like stacking. Others, like grouping and filtering using the column headers in Explorer will be far slower, regardless of how fast your hard drive is. In fact, faster hard drives gain more benefit from the indexer, not less.

Other data like e-mail stored in Outlook is always, always going to be far faster when searched from the index. There's just no way around that. As more and more third-party applications build on Windows Search (like my Start++ tool does), turning it off is going to cost you more and more functionality and speed.

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It's safe to disable, you'll just be reducing your system's performance, especially on a high-memory system. That's like saying you're going to disable your CPU cache because you decide what's important to your CPU and not the CPU itself. It doesn't make any sense.

As for Windows Search, searching against just filenames on NTFS is going to always be pretty fast regardless of whether the drive/directory is indexed. On the other hand, if you're searching within file contents the amount of time it's going to take is exponentially higher (something that takes 1 second against the index will often take several minutes using grep). Other operations just aren't possible or won't work right, like stacking. Others, like grouping and filtering using the column headers in Explorer will be far slower, regardless of how fast your hard drive is. In fact, faster hard drives gain more benefit from the indexer, not less.

Other data like e-mail stored in Outlook is always, always going to be far faster when searched from the index. There's just no way around that. As more and more third-party applications build on Windows Search (like my Start++ tool does), turning it off is going to cost you more and more functionality and speed.

Couldn't have said it better myself. I don't see the point in disabling a bunch of stuff to get a placebo effect... Windows Vista flies like a bat out of hell on this machine, absolutely amazing. Besides, what is the point in having memory if it isn't going to be used? Windows Vista knows how to scale properly to hardware specifications, whereas Windows XP seems to be a bit out of place when it comes to newer, higher end machines as far as scalability goes.

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