Windows 8 memory management of 32-bit software?

dhdoyle

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Howdy!
When I was running Windows 7 (64-bit), I noticed that Firefox would hang fairly regularly. Now that I'm running Windows 8.1 (64-bit), several of my memory-intensive 32-bit programs hang badly. If I'm using one (example: heavy duty technical illustrating or Firefox), they will stop and give me the "busy" icon for several minutes. it isn't unusual for Windows to report that they have stopped responding, even though they will often finish whatever they were doing. It will also cause the rest of my desktop to slow down.

I'm running Windows 8.1 (64 bit) on a laptop with an AMD A10-5750M and 6 gb RAM. It's not the zippiest hardware out there, but Task Manager says that even when something is stalled, I'm still not close to maxing out my CPU cycles, RAM and disk access. Frankly, several of these programs run better in XP. Unfortunately, 64-bit versions of most of these programs aren't yet available.

Can somebody please explain what's happening?
 
Solution
For memory, check the "available memory" is at least 1GB.
For CPU, check that no one core is at 100%. Total CPU usage is not useful because many applications make little use of more than one core.
For disk, you may need to use performance monitor.
Expand physical disk and select "% Disk Time" and "Current Disc Queue Length".
Select each physical disk and then click add.
If you have more than one disk, the "total" values are not helpful.
The disk throughput shown in task manager is also not helpful as it gives no indication of how busy the disk is servicing the requests of various processes.
If any of your disks are at 100% disk usage or higher, the machine is disk bound at that time.

As for comparing to Windows XP, it does have a smaller footprint and can run better on slow machines. You often can't get drivers for newer hardware though and XP doesn't have optimisations for modern AMD CPUs.
 
Is your BIOS and graphics adapter drivers up to date? It might help to know the model number (Exact model number) of your laptop. There shouldn't be any performance difference between 64-bit apps and 32-bit apps. Each is designed to work with your system. I'd probably start by using display driver uninstaller to remove the current drivers and any leftover bits from the windows native drivers and then install the latest AMD drivers. I'm assuming you're using the integrated APU graphics and not a separate GPU. If that's not correct, what is the model of the GPU.

DDU: http://www.wagnardmobile.com/DDU/

Current AMD drivers (Includes chipset and USB controllers): http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/mobile?os=Windows%208.1%20-%2064






 
is the program that you running made to run on Windows 7 and/or Windows 8?

If not:
You might try also running the applications in XP comatibility mode.
To change compatibility settings manually for a program, right-click the icon for the program, click Properties, and then click the Compatibility tab.




Setting

Description








Compatibility mode





Runs the program using settings from a previous version of Windows. Try this setting if you know the program is designed for (or worked in) a specific previous version of Windows.







Run in 256 colors





Uses a limited set of colors in the program. Some older programs are designed to use fewer colors.







Run in 640 × 480 screen resolution





Runs the program in a smaller-sized window. Try this setting if the graphical user interface appears jagged or is rendered improperly.







Disable visual themes





Disables themes on the program. Try this setting if you notice problems with the menus or buttons on the title bar of the program.







Disable desktop composition





Turns off transparency and other advanced display features. Choose this setting if window movement appears erratic or you notice other display problems.







Disable display scaling on high DPI settings





Turns off automatic resizing of programs if large-scale font size is in use. Try this setting if large-scale fonts are interfering with the appearance of the program. For more information, see Make the text on your screen larger or smaller and Ways to improve display quality.







Privilege level





Runs the program as an administrator. Some programs require administrator privileges to run properly. If you are not currently logged on as an administrator, this option is not available.







Show settings for all users





Lets you choose settings that will apply to all users on this computer.



http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/make-older-programs-run#1TC=windows-vista
 

dhdoyle

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Oct 25, 2014
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Thanks for your reply My bios and video drivers are both current. I updated them just a couple weeks ago.
I'm running an HP Envoy M6-n010dx. It's a very new machine - the mobo on my nice ASUS ultrabook died unexpectedly and with horrible timing. I've had to replace it with one that I could afford immediately.
 

dhdoyle

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Oct 25, 2014
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Thanks for the info! I loaded down this laptop and opened the Resource Monitor. It shows that my Free Memory is about 100 mb - essentially zero. Standby memory (prefetch + superfetch?) has been allocated almost everything. While I was working on these replies, Firefox stopped again and I noticed that it was causing >100 hard faults / sec until it started responding again. It's continuing to toss out memory faults.

Resource monitor shows that I'm occasionally running into long disk queues (>2.0) and short bursts of high active time (>90 to 100%). As I write this, Firefox is continually reading about 2 mb/sec (with episodes of 74mb/sec) from c:\pagefile.sys and writing periodically to c:\$Logfile and to a temp file.

My drive is partitioned with a small C: and most of my space allocated to D:, which contains \User\Me\My Documents and all of my working files.

Apparently my CPU load isn't an issue. I'm currently running on an energy-saving profile, so cpu2 and cpu3 are parked.

I hope this clarifies my problem.
 
What's your story with the OS media? Do you have Windows 8 full version installation media or an upgrade disk? Did 8 come installed on the system or 7? Basically, I'm wanting to know if you did the install yourself, how you did it (Upgrade, custom, clean?) or if there is just a recovery partition. Since you said you had 7 and now have 8 I'm guessing you purchased 8 but I need some clarification. Did you install windows 8 over an older copy of 7? I'm thinking that a clean install is probably going to be necessary. Usually issues with the superfetch not working correctly and far incorrect memory allocations are generally due to a bad or corrupted install or update.
 


Short periods where the disk usage is 100% or the disk queue is 2 are normal.
If the disk is significantly loaded, you will see extended periods where the disk usage is over 100% and the disk queue will increase over this time.

Firefox having hard faults does suggest it has been pushed out to paging file, but not necessarily that it is what is using your physical memory.

Available memory of 100MB is a problem, and suggests something is hogging your memory.

Open up task manager:
- View processes for all users
- Add a column for "Working Set (memory)" if it is not already there
- Sort by this column
What processes are using a lot of memory?
If Firefox is a culprit, try downloading Google Chrome.
 


Yeah, there's a good chance that with 6GB of RAM it may actually be using and accessing virtual memory more than normal, but probably not extensively. Maybe though.
 
Solution


This isn't what I said. 4GB of RAM should be more than enough to run normal desktop applications and a web browser without running low on available memory. Something is using more memory than it should.