Update: It's come to light that the Devil Mountain Software's CTO, Craig Barth, doesn't truly exist and is actually an InfoWorld contributor named Randall C. Kennedy. Read more about the scandal here.
When I pay the money to drop at least 6GB of RAM into my system, I want it all to be put to use. Compared to Windows XP, both Windows Vista and Windows 7 make more active use of system memory. But according to Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet) CTO, Craig Barth, that sort of RAM management results in undesirable performance.
According to the Computerworld report, XPnet found that 40 percent of its Windows XP machines ran into low-memory situations, while 86 percent of its Windows 7 machines are regularly consuming 90 percent to 95 percent of their available RAM.
Barth said that the hungry RAM consumption of Windows 7 result in slow-downs. "The vast majority of Windows 7 machines over the last several months are very heavily-memory saturated," he said. "From a performance standpoint, that has an immediate impact on the machine."
"This is alarming," Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. "For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is."
Alarming findings aside, XPnet observed that Windows 7 PCs sport an average of 3.3GB of RAM, compared to 1.7GB for Windows XP and 2.7GB for Windows Vista machines.
We recall that the design of Windows Vista (and by extension, Windows 7) has it consuming more RAM for practical, useful purposes rather than letting it sit idle. Nevertheless, we have contacted Microsoft for an official answer to this memory issue. More to come.
