I've just got Vista, and i'd like some recommendations of what apps i could try on the sidebar.


What do you LFS'ers use?

Also, whenever i press "ALT + S" to post it just brings up my History - how can i disable this in Firefox?

You got Vista? My condolences.

Quote from AndroidXP :

You got Vista? My condolences.

64 Bit, so i need them.

Currently in a situation where if i try to change resolutions or enable my second monitor the drivers make my main screen go green with crazy lines down it

Runs nicely, but i REALLY dislike it eating 900 MB of RAM :X

i use the thing which shows how much your Ram is being used

I have my own personal message

and

I have the time!

Quote from Jakg :

it eating 900 MB of RAM

I just lost 1000 brain cells. I vomited them when I read this.

Sidebar uses most CPU time from any of my processes, it is around 20% constant CPU load with clock and memopad only. So I prefer to shut down that.

When Vista boots (which takes over 10minutes btw) it consumes over 700MB of memory, then I kill few not needed processes and get down to around 450MB of memory usage. However if I try to do anything with it, memory consuming jumps to roof.

Laptop with 3400+ Duron CPU, radeon express 1100 and 1GB of ram, LFS is not running at playable rates, it is tad heavy with all features on for this machine and there is no Aero in this Basic version

For CPU and memory usage I just use taskmanager minimized, really can't use sidebar for anything as it is just too heavy.

Quote from JTbo :

Sidebar uses most CPU time from any of my processes, it is around 20% constant CPU load with clock and memopad only. So I prefer to shut down that.

When Vista boots (which takes over 10minutes btw) it consumes over 700MB of memory, then I kill few not needed processes and get down to around 450MB of memory usage. However if I try to do anything with it, memory consuming jumps to roof.

Laptop with 3400+ Duron CPU, radeon express 1100 and 1GB of ram, LFS is not running at playable rates, it is tad heavy with all features on for this machine and there is no Aero in this Basic version

For CPU and memory usage I just use taskmanager minimized, really can't use sidebar for anything as it is just too heavy.

Microsoft. All show,no go. Intelligent solutions from Redmond.

Quote from JTbo :

Sidebar uses most CPU time from any of my processes, it is around 20% constant CPU load with clock and memopad only. So I prefer to shut down that.

On of the UKCT members has the same thing and thinks his AMD CPU is to blame - if i just leave it on the desktop i get less than 1% load on all cores using my Intel.

Just wish it used less RAM and more CPU so i could just chuck a whole core at Vista!

Quote from Jakg :

On of the UKCT members has the same thing and thinks his AMD CPU is to blame - if i just leave it on the desktop i get less than 1% load on all cores using my Intel.

Just wish it used less RAM and more CPU so i could just chuck a whole core at Vista!

I think it have to be something like that too, but for example Turion CPU runs it really fast and nice, so it might be related to Duron CPU and small cache that it has, anyway bloody annoying when every action takes good deal of time to complete.

According to PC mark 05 my laptop performs as good as Pentium 3 does...

Quote from JTbo :

When Vista boots (which takes over 10minutes btw) it consumes over 700MB of memory, then I kill few not needed processes and get down to around 450MB of memory usage. However if I try to do anything with it, memory consuming jumps to roof.

They say Win XP needs 4 GBytes of mem before it gets up and flys, so I wonder how much vista needs

I recently got a new notebook with intel core duo 2 2ghz and 1 GB mem with vista preinstalled. Was quite disapointed with it, so now it has XP Pro which runs quite nicely on it I don't think the problem is just amd related, vista must be very fussy with hardware in general

I suggest people read up about memory management in Vista before making too many more comments bashing it for it's high memory usage.

I don't see people slating Mac OSX for using 75-80% of available ram...

Back to the original point, I just used to use a HDD space monitor, a BBC news feed, and a Radio 1 gadget.. I found the sidebar badly built, some/a large proportion of gadgets failed to load when downloaded/run.

About the time I gave up with Vista though was when I (foolishly) tried to use its inbuilt Zip function, it worked fine in XP, yet in Vista it had been released in the full knowledge it didn't work. n1 MS.

Quote from pb32000 :

I suggest people read up about memory management in Vista before making too many more comments bashing it for it's high memory usage.

Memory usage says 700MB, computer utter slow, opening my documents takes over 5 seconds easily, open few office apps and it is waiting program to respond, swapping all day long.

Memory usage says 450MB(when killing all stupid processes and sidebar) computer works somewhat semi ok speed, but when you open few office app you need at work it becomes utter slow as memory usage reaches again over 600MB.

Now tell me, how much I need to read until my computer starts working well with 1GB?

It just uses too much memory for itself, OS should be minimalistic base for apps, providing smooth performance with minimum hardware, Vista fails, reading books does not help...

I'm not bashing it, i'm just saying that it was a shock to have spent £67 on an OS purely for it to eat a £36 stick of memory all by itself!

Is there a temperature monitor at all?

Here you can find something http://gallery.live.com/

Quote from JTbo :

It just uses too much memory for itself, OS should be minimalistic base for apps, providing smooth performance with minimum hardware, Vista fails, reading books does not help...

Oh I completely agree, and as you say Vista fails badly there. The idea of memory caching for commonly used applications just isn't well implemented in Vista, thus producing a slower user experience than previous versions of Windows. Added to that the amount of useless crap in Vista it is a fair bit slower.

I've moved back to XP having trialed Vista for a few months. I failed to see how Vista could help me in any way, plus some of my commonly used applications didn't even have Vista compatible versions when I used it.

My comment wasn't really directed at you and Jack, it just seems people are all too quick to jump in for a good bit of Vista/MS bashing

Quote from pb32000 :

My comment wasn't really directed at you and Jack, it just seems people are all too quick to jump in for a good bit of Vista/MS bashing

The same thing happened when the "bloated XP" came out in comparison to 2000 - people will come around, but atm i'm not feeling "the wow factor". Except if you call it "wow, yet AGAIN my display drivers crashed".

Gotta give it a try i suppose, i've shelled out £67 on this OS so i think i'm stuck with it!

Like the Volvo man, I really haven't understood the MS philosophy behind the development, I mean, shouldn't the new program be better than the previous old versions? Work faster and be smoother, the lot. There is no reason why 64 bit CPUs or DX10 couldn't be made work on XP is there? MS is disusing it's leading role on the market and making, and eventually forcing, people buy crap so they can control people and their stuff with their spyware. They should look up Scawen Roberts and LFS for how it should done.

And to save me from going off-topic I say that for Vista applications I would search something in the lines of self destruction button. :P

In Vista there is nice features like cpu load balancing and memory things, in theory.

In practise they have forgotten two things, limitations. If we would have unlimited amount of memory and CPU power it would work fine, but problem is we don't have even decent amount of those (well some have, but they are rich and happy) so how it could work well?

Sure in few years it is better when computers have much faster 4 core cpus and 8GB of ram at standard, but if instead of vista that effort has been put to XP it would be ton faster.

XP SP2 made big jump for ram usage also, before that XP was usable with 256MB of ram, after that 512MB was required and with all latest patches 1GB was not going to be overhelming indeed.

With Vista we probably see similar thing and soon it is struggling to run with 2GB of ram.

Some time ago I launched two apps that together need approx 600-700MB of mem, it took 3 hours to get them shut down as 1GB run totally out and Vista used over 2GB of memory from some odd reason.

It has odd way of using ram, when it looks like 1GB is going to be bit too little, it uses much more for same app than when 1GB looks to be quite enough (amount of other apps running varies).

Also when I took memory stick out memory usage increased by 300MB one day, have been looking into this and it does that more or less frequently, maybe it was some neat feature as using memory stick as extension of ram or something like that, very annoying anyway

If you don't like Windows bloated, try nLite (covers XP + others, there is a different version that covers Vista too). I'm sure I'm only using it because somebody posted about it here a few months back. Halves XPs resource hogging, slipstreams all the patches, even my serial, and makes it run speedier too. My saviour.

vLite, you mean? I tried it but it wasn't really my thing.

I must confess Vista does feel "snappy", but to be fair i'd hope thats more of the PC than the OS

Jakg, first thing I do when I install Vista, is kill the sidebar from ever starting ever again. Also, the way Vista's memory management works, is it uses RAM more efficiently, than drops it when a game starts, it just fails at the whole dropping RAM bit.

Also, the AMD bug runs true with me in Vista, but Longhorn Server seems to kill said bug very effectively.

Also, I've seemed to have less of the issues with Vista as everyone else has had, sure there are times where I want to kill someone while using it, but that's just becuase I bought a Mac (and have 32 bits of wasted C2D). like people have issues with memory, I seem to have not as many issues, other than the fact that 1 GB of RAM is not a lot of RAM.

On my system Vista feels faster and more responsive than XP. I boot between XP, Vista and Gentoo Linux. I agree that 1GB memory for Vista is just barely enough, >2GB is in my opinion the best for it. But don't go completely blind about what it reports as free memory, it manages the memory differently from XP.

Here's a program for tweaking and optimizing Vista:
http://www.yamicsoft.com/vistamanager/index.html

Also worth noting is that Microsoft recently made available two pretty major updates dealing with performance and compatibility issues. They have not been released on Windows Update yet, but will later as well as be included in the upcoming SP1.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938979
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938194

...yeah I used to use Opera widgets but they use a lot of mem, sadly too do the vista ones 100k at times!

heres a desktop screenie anyway.

Quote from arco :

On my system Vista feels faster and more responsive than XP. I boot between XP, Vista and Gentoo Linux. I agree that 1GB memory for Vista is just barely enough, >2GB is in my opinion the best for it. But don't go completely blind about what it reports as free memory, it manages the memory differently from XP.

Here's a program for tweaking and optimizing Vista:
http://www.yamicsoft.com/vistamanager/index.html

Also worth noting is that Microsoft recently made available two pretty major updates dealing with performance and compatibility issues. They have not been released on Windows Update yet, but will later as well as be included in the upcoming SP1.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938979
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938194

I've installed them, not noticed anything, but I'm sure I would have if I had it a day ago with my large amounts of file copying.

Quote from CSU1 :

...yeah I used to use Opera widgets but they use a lot of mem, sadly too do the vista ones 100k at times!

Can't confirm that, works nicely using UP to 1 MB.