[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by JBotAlan

What do you use Vista for? Word processing and checking your e-mail? Or do you have one of those 4.5GHz machines with 8GB of RAM?

That's a bit of a false dichotomy, isn't it? Incidentally, it's used for all the usual office stuff (several running at once, of course), plus CAD and 3-D games. And the computer isn't anything fancy, either: the everyday desktop system has a 2.8 GHz P4 (Northwood, with SMT) with 1.5 GB of RAM, a 9600 Pro with 128 MB of RAM, and boots off of a pair of WD360GDs in a RAID 1 array. That's early-to-mid-2003 technology, and it manages to score 4.2/4.5/4.2/3.7/5.1 on the Windows Experience Index test (where 3.0s are marginal for Vista with Aero and sufficient without Aero, 4.0s are considered enough for Vista with Aero, and 5.0s were top-end as of fall 2006). And more importantly, it runs pretty well. Yes, running Windows 2000 SP4 was a little faster for basic things (with its less-resource-intensive version of Windows Explorer), but Vista is hardly slow.

Originally Posted by JBotAlan

For me, it is the fact that with every feature turned off it takes 1GB of 2GB RAM total...AT IDLE. What could it possibly be doing with all of that RAM? I can't even express how outrageous that is...

That's a common misconception, but in fact, this behaviour is beneficial to your system (though admittedly not to your power consumption). The important metric for memory usage on a Windows NT system is the commit charge, which is loosely expressed in Task Manager as the Pagefile Usage graph. (Microsoft has managed to mislabel it in XP, but it was right in 2000, and is pretty much right in Vista.) The commit limit is the maximum amount of memory the system can allocate—usually defaulting to approximately 1.5 times your physical memory, depending on the pagefile settings.

Now, the entire strategy employed by Windows is to use up as much of the physical RAM as possible, while keeping the pagefile at its default size (it can grow in response to memory needs). Why? Because RAM is fast, and if you're not using it, it's doing nothing for you, in terms of performance. Windows tries to keep as much stuff as possible in RAM, and stores the rest off to the side, but readily accessible in the page file. It will look first in the RAM, and if it finds what it needed, there are no HD operations involved, speeding things up. When it does need to consult the hard drive, then things do slow down a little, but not until you run out of pagefile room (i.e. you hit the commit limit) are you actually out of memory. So when Windows has 1 GB of RAM allocated at idle, it's because it's trying to save time the next time you need to fetch something from RAM, by precaching it. This is actually a good thing, but because of the way Windows 95/98/Me handled memory, people still think that using up a lot of memory at idle is a bad thing. To reiterate: you're only in trouble when you need to handle more data at once than you have physical memory (e.g. a 2 GB paging operation, on a system with 1 GB of RAM), or when you exceed the commit limit. Prior to that, the ideal situation is for 100% of your physical RAM to be filled with useful stuff by the operating system.

Originally Posted by JBotAlan

Vista keeps the cores on a dual-core 1.7GHz system around 20% load, as opposed to XP's occasional 1%. This makes power saving impossible--since the cores never idle, the battery is always being sucked down and the fan is always on. Even the simplest of games (Pocket Tanks, StepMania) running on top of Vista run at half their intended frame rate, even on a system with a specially purchased nVIDIA chip, instead of the crappy Intel Integrated stuff.

There are a couple of things that might be the source of your issues. Have you set the power management options to Power Saver? And what's disk indexing set to do? The indexing service is a bit of a resource hog, when it's updating its catalogue; it's the most likely candidate for eating 20% of your CPU time. Many people don't use its features, and can simply disable it. If you do use it (e.g. you search indexed areas often), you can change its power management options in the Control Panel, so that it doesn't suck down so much power when the computer is idle; this will make the indexing process take longer, but it won't use as much power. As for the games, are you sure it isn't the video driver? There are several documented issues with slightly out-of-date nVidia drivers and Vista; I think they've been mostly ironed out, but some of the slowdowns were pretty significant, on some hardware. For comparison, I run Battlefield 2 at 1024 × 768, 32 bit colour, full view depth, full geometric detail, full lighting, and low effects (that's for gameplay advantage...) on a four-year-old video card, under Vista, sometimes with Outlook and Pro/E running. And I can still get 25-40 FPS consistently.

Originally Posted by JBotAlan

Not to mention everything has been moved. Something that was 3 clicks away in XP is now buried under new headings in the Control Panel.

This is a pain, but the old Control Panel is still there, if desired, and the search box is very good within the Control Panel.