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To: Scumbria who wrote (131471)	4/2/2001 3:15:12 AM
From: minnow68	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Scumbria, You wrote "Why doesn't Microsoft ship that option as standard? The OS is unusable without it." Yes, it is quite annoying isn't it! The reason it isn't standard is that this little bug only shows up when there are very large amounts of RAM installed. What happens is that Windows goes crazy trying to disk cache more files than fit in memory, so Windows starts using virtual memory(!!!!) to cache the files. Needless to say, using virtual memory to cache files is insanity and is clearly an algorithm bug. Microsoft shows no interest in fixing it. It was been present since day 1 of Windows95 and is still here all the way through Windows ME. I've personally seen Windows 95/98 pointlessly caching hundreds of megabytes of files, totally destroying system performance. Mike

To: Scumbria who wrote (131471)	4/3/2001 9:45:06 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Scumbria - re: Windows ME memory leaks Memory management on all of the old generation, DOS based Windows products is terrible as is task management. Over the years they went from single task to pseudo-multi-task to time slice multi-task. They never really got to event driven multi-task. Likewise with memory - from no memory management at all, to "let the program do it", to virtual machines which locked and owned their memory, to a crude process swap mechanism. Windows ME, like Win98 and Win95 before it, does not really do anything effective with more than 128MB RAM and the default is to use it for cache, which makes all those other kludge constructs run faster. But at its heart it was designed to do one thing at a time and even today it mostly does one thing at a time only faster. NT was from the beginning a fully virtual architecture, abstracting both the memory and other machine resources and presenting a programming model which presents those resources in a consistent way, and allows the OS to manage the real, physical resources without disturbing the view programs have of the machine. It's neat to watch the gradual shift of resources away from processes getting less use while minimizing idle resources. The original design was very elegant. It has gotten a little less so over time - the decision to include things like graphical components in the core OS was misguided IMO, for example. But it still gives the administrator a lot of control over how things are done and does not have the silly failure modalities of the old Windows. I think MS decided a ways back just to shift away from that old base rather than try and fix it since they were locked into a lot of design "features" by the big base of "legacy" code. Windows XP is the convergence product they have been trying for since 1994. My sympathies to you if you are using any of those DOS based OS variants to do anything serious.