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Free up Windows 7 memory usage to reduce disk swapping
Hi Folks,
I installed Windows 7 on my Windows XP pro NEC netbook to be able to make use of the Intel GMA 500 H264 AVC hardware video decoding. That works pretty well and allows 720p H.264 AVC video decoding with subtitles in real time with minor CPU usage. Now the problem is free memory.
My machine only has 1GB memory and is NON-UPGRADEABLE. I cannot add more RAM, there is no second slot and the first DIMM is soldered on apparently. Is there any way to make Windows 7 Home Premium 32 to be a little slimmer. As is it takes up most RAM and under available I get at best about 200MB. I use NOD32 as my AV and have very little running otherwise. Is it possible to make Windows 7 use less RAM? Obviously I can't buy more RAM because the machine is not upgradeable. The machine originally shipped with either Vista Basic or XP Pro and NEC in Akihabara put XP Pro for me but Intel never made drivers for H/W H.264 decoding for XP Pro hence my need to run 7. XP itself was significantly faster in startup (less than 14 seconds) and operation than 7 and less SSD use was noted
but software CPU decoding of H.264 using CoreAVC was taxing the CPU at close to 100%.
The machine still runs very fast as it has a Toshiba SSD with a slightly faster than average Atom at 1.86GHz but with so little available (not free) RAM I'm afraid Windows will destroy the SSD with frequent writes. Windows does not even see it as an SSD as it scheduled defrag for it, which I disabled.
So if anyone has any hints and suggestions, I'm all ears. Thank you very much :).