PCTips Box

Windows Vista “out of memory” errors are intimately connected with the way the operating system manages virtual address space. On Microsoft’s latest operating system, applications have their very own private virtual address space. You must understand that there is no correlation between the virtual address space available to a certain program and the total volume of physical memory installed on the computer. On 32-bit platforms, applications are generally limited under a 2 GB boundary as the maximum size of the virtual address space. In this context, the “out of memory” errors in Windows Vista are generated by applications that have eaten up all the virtual address space allocated to them.

“Every memory allocation, file mapping, or library that is loaded by an application consumes space in this virtual address space. When the application consumes all its virtual address space, any additional such operations fail. Although all applications should be coded to handle memory allocation failures, many applications do not recover correctly from such failures. Therefore, the programs may become unstable or stop responding after they recover from such failures”, Microsoft informed. (more…)

Just because Windows Vista is such a resource hog, the operating system features the Windows Experience Index, a rating system designed to measure the capability of the computer’s hardware configuration in order to assess the overall performance of the machine through a numeric base score. The algorithm for determining a base score ranging from 1.0 to 5.9 is directly connected with the processor, physical memory (RAM), graphics, gaming graphics and the primary hard disk. However, there are a few contexts in which the Windows Experience Index, the mechanism at the basis of the system rating will present and erroneous score for the hardware configuration.

This is a problem observed following the commercial release of the operating system back in January 2007. (more…)

Windows Vista has many new features that are designed to help older computers run Windows Vista better. One of those features and the topic of this tweak is called ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost helps your computer by giving it more high-speed memory. If your computer is running low on RAM then it has to kick a lot of applications out of high-speed physical memory to the paging file on your hard drive. This usually results in a big hit in performance and increased activity on your hard drive. ReadyBoost helps this situation by giving Windows an alternative to having to stick data into the slow paging file on your hard drive. Instead, ReadyBoost uses a USB storage device that is faster than a hard disk. This results in a performance boost because Windows will have a high speed alternative than using the slow paging file on your hard drive. (more…)

Windows Vista gadgets can do more than show the weather and keep you updated on the latest news. The Windows Vista Sidebar can also be used to install gadgets that are useful as system utilities that keep track of the resources Windows Vista is using.

Windows Sidebar gadgets have been created that can keep track of how Windows Vista is using your CPU, memory, hard drive and network resources.

Below are some of the best Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets available that can be used to help keep track of system resources: (more…)