Free up Windows 7 memory usage to reduce disk swapping

[Puragu]

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 .

 

[whs]

I am afraid there is little you can do. Some people recommend to disable some of the processes that are not needed. The problem is that you never know which ones are really not needed.

As far as the SSD goes, I would no worry about the lifetime. It will hold up longer than you will care to keep this system.

 

[Puragu]

I am afraid there is little you can do. Some people recommend to disable some of the processes that are not needed. The problem is that you never know which ones are really not needed.

As far as the SSD goes, I would no worry about the lifetime. It will hold up longer than you will care to keep this system.

Thanks for the reply. The main worry is that the SSD will fail because MLC flash has a limited number of write cycles and this is a 1st Gen Toshiba SSD. However, perhaps as you say this drive will hold for a while. Saying this I've had a Gen2 Intel X25-M fail on me after several months of limited use and it wasn't from being written to, too much.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello Puragu, welcome to Seven Forums!



Perhaps using another AV such as MSs own MS Security Essentials will free up some resources for you.


Microsoft Security Essentials

 

[whs]

Let me show you the health status of one of my first gen Intels that I use since 2008. It will last another 10 years.

 

[Puragu]

Let me show you the health status of one of my first gen Intels that I use since 2008. It will last another 10 years.

Hi Whs,

Thanks for your reply. It's good to know that that drive works so well after a long time. I hope Toshiba is as good as Intel in their QA.

I own 3 SSDs. One in my 2009 Japanese NEC netbook. Then I put a second gen X-25M in my Mac Pro which really makes OSX Leopard bootup in about 6 seconds. Then I bought a second 160GB Intel X-25M for my Let's Note notebook running WinXP Pro. It died after 3 months. The 2nd Gen Intel in the Mac Pro was purchased in 2009 and it works great. It's used as the OS drive and applications drive for Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. I used to push Intel SSDs on everyone in online recommendations but sadly after the death of a brand new X-25M I've had to eat my words. My failure rate on these is 50% and granted this could lead to the fallacy of small numbers but these drives are still very expensive. However your comments on your own drives are encouraging. Thanks

 

[Puragu]

Hello Puragu, welcome to Seven Forums!



Perhaps using another AV such as MSs own MS Security Essentials will free up some resources for you.


Microsoft Security Essentials

Hi Bare Foot Kid,

Thanks for the welcome .

I've tried MS Security Essentials before and it made WinXP crawl on that netbook. Maybe it uses less RAM but it slowed everything down. With ESET NOD32 I see no performance decrease between switching it off or on. I used the WinXP Pro version
of Security Essentials on WinXP Pro before but sadly it was too slow. Do you think the Win7 version is faster? I have Windows Defender service running though for spyware which NOD32 may miss.

I disabled the MS Printing service, since I don't use this device to print from. If I need to print I transfer via USB stick or email to a different PC and print from that.

Thanks

Oh BTW, Microsoft H264 Decoder is the bomb! It is the only decoder capable of proper H.264 AVC 720p decoding using DXVA. I tried Cyberlink PowerDVD8's H264 Decoder -> screen corruption and SLOW in DVXA mode, I tried DivX H.264 decoder in DVXA mode -> slower and screen corruption, I tried FFDSHOW TryOuts decoder -> no go at all. CoreAVC in DXVA mode is also slow.

This is the only decoder which works with subtitles and it works virtually flawlessly on a system which has 1080p H.264 h/w decoding in GMA500 chipset. The rest are a waste of time and money, it is also FREE with Windows 7.

 

[Bill2]

Pagefile reads vastly outnumber page file writes. Theres no problem with pagefile operations on SSDs at least per this.

Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Have you tried readyboost? It'll not be magical but may help a little.

 

[Oaken]

I have little experience with SSDs (so apols if this is moot), though have you considered using ReadyBoost? ReadyBoost can provide additional memory to up maximum 256 GB using most flash storage devices/USB port???

 

[Vertex]

I too have an old computer with just 1GB RAM and an Intel Pentium Dual CPU E2180@2GHz. It works fairly for basic computing and I was even able to watch live TV in it with Windows Media Center and play games but you can't expect it to do so good when running resource hogging programs or when running so many programs at the same time. It works just fine for me even if I had most of the visual effects and Aero enabled.

If you don't care much about the eye candy visual effects, you might wanna consider disabling Aero cause that will make the machine use RAM and resources, saving them for use of other things like running your programs more smoothly.

When trying antivirus software, it is advised that you don't have 2 different antivirus programs running and installed at the same time because this results into a conflict that usually makes computers very slow.

When you installed Microsoft Security Essentials on your Windows XP on the netbook, did you have any other antivirus programs installed?? Did you install Microsft Security Essentials on your Windows XP with ESET NOD32 installed at the same time? It is advisable that you don't have the two of them installed at the same time so if you are gonna try a new antivirus program over another, please uninstall the other one before installing the new one.

However, some people on this forum have suggested that Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes don't conflict each other and can be installed on the computer at the same time.

 

[Puragu]

Pagefile reads vastly outnumber page file writes. Theres no problem with pagefile operations on SSDs at least per this.

Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Have you tried readyboost? It'll not be magical but may help a little.

Thanks. I'll give it a try, I have an SD reader in the netbook, I'd rather not use a USB stick as they tend to hang out and get damaged, but maybe an SHDC card will do.

For some reason Win 7 did not recognise my SSD as an SSD. I had to disable SuperFetch and Scheduled Defrag manually. Well it's good to know that most PageFile.Sys operations are read operations. Thanks for the link.

 

[Puragu]

I too have an old computer with just 1GB RAM and an Intel Pentium Dual CPU E2180@2GHz. It works fairly for basic computing and I was even able to watch live TV in it with Windows Media Center and play games but you can't expect it to do so good when running resource hogging programs or when running so many programs at the same time. It works just fine for me even if I had most of the visual effects and Aero enabled.

If you don't care much about the eye candy visual effects, you might wanna consider disabling Aero cause that will make the machine use RAM and resources, saving them for use of other things like running your programs more smoothly.

Yes I already disabled that. I'm running the Windows 7 Basic theme without animations and other stuff. That's good advice. The eye candy does slow things down, even though the Intel GMA500 does support AERO, its support is quite slow. Thanks.

When trying antivirus software, it is advised that you don't have 2 different antivirus programs running and installed at the same time because this results into a conflict that usually makes computers very slow.

When you installed Microsoft Security Essentials on your Windows XP on the netbook, did you have any other antivirus programs installed?? Did you install Microsft Security Essentials on your Windows XP with ESET NOD32 installed at the same time? It is advisable that you don't have the two of them installed at the same time so if you are gonna try a new antivirus program over another, please uninstall the other one before installing the new one.

Nope, I did not have anything else. NEC supplies Japanese TrendMicro AV trial but I never enabled that. I installed MS Essentials initially and noticed a tremendous drop in performance and increase in boot times/program startup times over the barebones system. The difference was great and only caused by using MS Security Essentials because enabling/disabling it affected the performance. I heard that NOD32 is written in assembler and probably one of the fastest AV's around and so tried the 30 day trial and the difference was noticeable. Despite having all the major real time options on, I noticed no performance drop with ESET. I then decided to buy a 2y license. I used Comodo FireWall Pro as the firewall software and noticed that it did not affect system stability or speed at all either. Currently using Win 7 firewall, MS Defender and ESET NOD32.

However, some people on this forum have suggested that Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes don't conflict each other and can be installed on the computer at the same time.

I've used MalwareBytes only to scan stuff but in the free version, ie. not in real time. Have you used Comodo FireWall before? It's pretty good. The Comodo AV doesn't pick up all viruses though and missed stuff which Bitdefender would find (that was in 2008).

 

[whs]

Pagefile reads vastly outnumber page file writes. Theres no problem with pagefile operations on SSDs at least per this.

Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Have you tried readyboost? It'll not be magical but may help a little.

Thanks. I'll give it a try, I have an SD reader in the netbook, I'd rather not use a USB stick as they tend to hang out and get damaged, but maybe an SHDC card will do.

For some reason Win 7 did not recognise my SSD as an SSD. I had to disable SuperFetch and Scheduled Defrag manually. Well it's good to know that most PageFile.Sys operations are read operations. Thanks for the link.

If you disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost will not work.
Windows Administration: Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 2

 

[jimbo45]

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 .

Hi there
I've got an ASPIRE 1 Netbook that originally came with 1 GB RAM and only one slot

these days for around 35 GBP / 40 EUR / 50 USD you can get a SINGLE SLOT 4GB RAM module that fits just nicely into a netbook / Laptop.

Remove the original 1GB RAM module and replace it -- it's really easy to do --all you need is a philips type screwdriver - no electronics skills required. Same if you want to change the installed HDD.

Go for that -- cheap and effective --- combined with an SSD (optional) your Netbook even with a modest Single thread CPU in it will probably OUTPERFORM your desktop (assuming you aren't running GAMES or doing large Photoshop images) -- on smaller netbooks you'll need an external monitor for CS5 (Photoshop) since the standard screen of the small netbook won't give you the required minimum resolution for Photoshop - but with an external monitor the netbook upgraded as suggested performs brilliantly.

Typical Office type programs run very nicely indeed and with the SSD load almost instantly.

The Graphics card on the netbook is just fine for your video too.


Cheers
jimbo