Well, it seems obvious that theres a memory leak


It does not follow.

Memory leaks aren't just increased uses of memory over time. There can be many reasons for that behavior, some of them valid (and others idiotic but intentional). Memory leaks are defined as a specific program keeping hold of memory when no longer used, and/or not releasing memory when the program terminates. They're fairly rare issues, simply because there are so many garbage collection routines out there.

Remember that Windows Vista attempts to preload often-used tools into the system memory with spare processing cycles, in order to reduce the time it takes to start up an oft-used program. That behavior could easily explain this.

That's not to say there isn't a memory leak. Windows has had them before, such as the pre-VistaSP1 Energy screensaver, and third-party Sidebar creations have been known to run into that issue. It's a hard type of bug to diagnose without access to the design team's motivations and the source code for the program.

Boot time and install time issues you ran into are weird, though. The last release candidate of SP1 I installed took less than half that time with a (significantly) slower processor and hard drive, and the only time it flashed black was for a few seconds. Have you tried moving to an older version of nVidia's drivers?
gattsuru | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 7:48 am | #

how is it reacting to the various periphials? I've had several people report it not working with (even slightly) older printers and the like? Also for the networking, do you run any other OS on your computers at all?
Ruth | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 8:51 am | #

Well, I've got a digital audio processor, a calibrating light meter, a wireless desktop, a blutetooth dongle, a barcode reader, a 32 way card reader, two burners, one of which is a blu-ray HD-DVD combo drive with BluRay burning, and a 500gig eSata/USB2 external hard drive.

All of them seem to be functioning normally.

My printers are both networked, and less than three years old.

I run sevreal different OSes. I have a PS3, a Mac OSX box, win mobile 6, win xp, win vista, and a couple different linux distros running on my network. So far no problem interacting with any of them.
Chris Byrne | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 10:25 am | #

Gattsuru, I'm well aware of Windows various and sundry (and mostly stupid) caching routines; and those that are disableable, are disabled. Superfetch, precaching, quickstart, every unnecessary service, every superfluous registry startup etc...
Chris Byrne | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 10:27 am | #

I am not a computer geek and therefore not an authority like you Chris.

I just bought a crappy HP notebook with Vista on it and thought I would end up using it for a target at the rifle range based on all the complaints I have heard about it.

Functionally speaking, for all the simple things I do like microsoft office and surfing the internet and e-mail...this system is no better and no worse than XP.

Maybe it's only you tech heads that have your systems wired for sound that are having problems? For the simple stuff I do it hasn't been a problem...
Jim | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 11:17 am | #

Out of random curiosity why are you using Vista and not XP?
ParatrooperJJ | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 12:04 pm | #

Well, first, it came with the PC; but primarily its for game support (DX10 is Vista only) and windows media center.

As I said, I'm using it as a media server as well as for gaming.

I've got all the stuff that makes vista look any different from WIn2K disabled. I run the basic shell, no themes, no aeroglass, almost all the services disabled etc... and I have no more problems with Vista than I had with XP; which I also ran in a stripped configuration.
Chris Byrne | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 12:18 pm | #

Ruth

how is it reacting to the various periphials? I've had several people report it not working with (even slightly) older printers and the like? Also for the networking, do you run any other OS on your computers at all?

It's very dependent on what components you have, and where you got them. Most devices work fine, especially those from major manufacturers.
That said, there are some exceptions. I've had some 3Com and Hewlett-Packard components (mostly only relevant if you're installing Vista to a prebuilt XP-ready machine) that didn't get any real driver support, or actively tried to hide it. A number of security-oriented protocols were late, although I think even Cisco has caught up now. The biggest problem I've encountered in practice would be Lexmark's older inkjet printers, which haven't really been updated. Some specialized drivers my workplace uses have neither Vista nor 64-bit XP versions.
On the other side of things, a lot of older equipment does have drivers even surprisingly. I've found vista-compatible drivers for an HP DesignJet 330, a printer so old it thinks db-25s were a brilliant idea.

If most of your equipment is either standalone, fairly popular, uses standardized interfaces (mice, most joysticks), or made within the last couple of years, you'll be fine. If you've got older stuff, check with the manufacturer's website for Vista drivers; they're really the only ones that can help or hurt.

Chris Byrne
Gattsuru, I'm well aware of Windows various and sundry (and mostly stupid) caching routines; and those that are disableable, are disabled. Superfetch, precaching, quickstart, every unnecessary service, every superfluous registry startup etc...


:shrug: I was under the impression that some portions could not be so disabled. I'll defer to your knowledge.
gattsuru | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 1:50 pm | #

about the speed to install updates...

how is it that, with main memory sizes in the gigabytes, hard disk speeds now (still) faster than ever, multiple levels of cache, and CPU speeds being flatly ridiculous... that installing what's, honestly, not that much software (several hundred megs in the service pack? a few gigs at most?) can take umpteen minutes?

what's it doing all that time, churning the disk? shouldn't it be caching metadata and journalling disk updates? wasn't smarter and larger disk caches part of what virtual memory was supposed to gain us, what, about twenty years ago already?

i can install entire operating systems from scratch in twenty minutes on modern hardware. what business has one taking that long to patch itself?
Nomen Nescio | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 2:51 pm | #

NN, I couldn't agree with you more.
Chris Byrne | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 3:07 pm | #

Modern PCs just fly on Windows 3.11.

Progman.exe FTW!
Kristopher | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 4:08 pm | #

Interesting.

I run Vista Enterprise SP1 on an X64 with 4 gigs, and I reboot it only when I'm forced to by an update or Really Misbehaving Software (ie, every few weeks).

If there is a leak somewhere, I suspect it to not be in Vista itself.

Nomen: The reason a Vista install is so fast compared to XP is that it's installing filesystem fragments rather than individual files (I've heard a windows install has something like 30,000 tiny files. The overhead for that gets brutal.).

Patching, however, doesn't let you do that. You have to either replace entire files (which can still require reallocation and resizing and other slow FS operations), or even worse, modify existing files in place; adding a few byes in the middle of a file? Horribly expensive in comparison to patching together filesystem chunks on a clean disk.

...

To echo Gattsuru, I've had no driver problems on my new-built machine; it's mostly old stuff that has had issues, and current stuff at time-of-Vista-release.

It also networks just fine with Linux (and presumably also BSD and SunOS and whatever) and OSX.
Sigivald | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 5:28 pm | #

Thanks to both of you. I'm considering having to either make or buy a new computer in the next year or so, and I have to admit to being very suspicious of Vista!
Ruth | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 6:09 pm | #

My HP notebook Presario C500 came with Vista Basic and I've only had (mostly) compatibility issues with older software (also no where near enough memory, but that's not Vista's fault).

I do think it boots slow and awakes really slow and I shut it down at the end of the day.

Then again, I'm not challenging it much, either.
Ride Fast | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 7:39 pm | #

Chris,
You just don't understand! Memory leaks are a GOOD thing. If they weren't, why then did Microsoft include them in all previous versions of Windows?

There was a small oversight at Microsoft in the rush to release Vista, and insufficient memory leaks were included in the initial Vista release. Fortunately, when Microsoft realized this, they added additional memory leaks with SP1.

..... Mr. C.
Mr. Completely | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 7:41 pm | #

RF, the sleep/wake time issue was actually improved by SP1.

Gattsuru, the increases in memory allocation are coming from the various svchost processes, most of which are core services for the OS. The third party software is seeing minimal if any increase in passive allocation.
Chris Byrne | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 7:50 pm | #

i wrote the training manual for Vista for one of the top 3 cable internet companies here in the US... i can tell you first hand that my company in particular didnt even test for software compatibility until 2 months after it was released... it was 100% idiocy... i was working with entire research departments that had no freaking clue what they were doing... and not once did they think to have anyone go to seattle and work with MS...

even better... they didnt test XP 64bit until the same time... i almost got fired for asking a room full of board members "you mean that you guys decided to test an OS for compatibility a full 5 years after it came out?"

so far, all of the stuff ive dealt with regarding Vista has been totally perfect... the only downside ive encountered came from companies that were too stupid to make sure that their hardware worked with vista
chris | Email | Homepage | 03.20.08 - 8:34 pm | #

Hmmm ... other OS's try to be compatible with their customer's hardware.

If your current hardware is incompatible with Vista, it is somehow your fault?

Fail.
Kristopher | Email | Homepage | 03.21.08 - 10:32 am | #

Kristopher: Which OSes are these?

I think you grossly underestimate the variety of PC hardware in the world and the difficulty of the "simple" task you believe MS failed to conclude.

OSX only has to be compatible with Apple hardware, really. Third-party hardware in most cases has to provide its own drivers; Apple doesn't do that for them.

(A few things have builtin drivers, like some ethernet and SCSI cards, probably because Apple sold them as addons at some point, or they came free with the BSD kernel port.)

Sun does the same thing, for Solaris on Sparc. They support more on x86, but not everything.

Linux, well, lots of luck if there's no open spec on the hardware (ATI ring a bell?), or if it's new.

That leaves Windows ... where Microsoft, again, has never claimed to support most hardware automatically, at least not well. Because there's far too much of it, with too much variation. Why do you think hardware you buy comes with driver disks, always?

It's not MS's fault that hardware vendors ignored Vista through the entire beta/CTP program. They had years to get their act together to support Vista, and chose not to.

Microsoft literally cannot make and support drivers for every piece of hardware that you can put in your PC. (Not only is there just too much in too many subtle variations, but lots of it is proprietary.)

If your hardware is incompatible with Vista, it's not your fault, but it's not Microsoft's, either. It's your hardware vendor's fault.
Sigivald | Email | Homepage | 03.21.08 - 3:11 pm | #

Sigivald:

You are right... and not exactly so at the same time. Here's an old article I ran across recently:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar...les/ APIWar.html

The author of the article makes the case that MS has deliberately made the choice not to support older software and older drivers on the new OS. I agree that too many manufacturers were caught completely flat-footed with no Vista drivers available for their products when Vista was released last year, but at the same time there is so much more that MS could have done for the consumer in this regard as well -- especially considering that this was the design ethos in place when they released XP.

It's a double-fail, as far as I can see.
giddysinger | Email | Homepage | 03.21.08 - 3:48 pm | #

I stand by my statement.

The folks writing LINUX code at least made the attempt, as opposed to MS just taking legacy support out behind the shed and shooting it.

Screw them ... I will buy Vista only when some software I want absolutely requires it.
Kristopher | Email | Homepage | 03.21.08 - 5:01 pm | #

MS announced the development of Vista within months of releasing XP... they made no secrets of their plans for releasing it, and they expressly stated that there would be older devices that were not compatible... considering the average life of electronics components is less than 5 years, and possibly as little as 2 years, there is no reason to expect that any company would continue to support their functionality after that time frame... if a third party company cant find some point in the 5 year development process to work with MS and iron out issues how is it the fault of MS?
chris | Email | Homepage | 03.21.08 - 7:46 pm | #

"I agree that too many manufacturers were caught completely flat-footed with no Vista drivers available for their products when Vista was released last year"

This is baloney--Vista's been in development for years. Hardware manufacturers had plenty of time--IIRC Nvidia was coming out with WDDM drivers almost a year before Vista RTMed.
Rick C | Email | Homepage | 03.22.08 - 6:45 pm | #

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