If you own an Android device built by HTC, Motorola, or Samsung you most likely have a useful customized version of the built-in application manager. For example, Samsung’s TouchWiz features a widget that shows how many apps you currently have running, and will allow you to close apps one by one, or all apps at once with a single click.
It sounds overly simple, but ensuring that you don’t have apps running in the background when you don’t need them will save your battery. Each application might be taking up a very small amount of power, but it adds up over time.
I work with security DVRs running NT4 that had uptime beyond 270 days, so… this certainly isn’t new, or even remarkable.
It’s always been apps that messed Windows up.
Yeah, I just bought a brand-new Lenovo that has Intel’s HD4000, which does use unified memory.
This is the chipset they buy from Intel to make it happen:
I haven’t used Windows 8 at all aside from five minutes helping a relative set up a new laptop over Christmas (and it took me long enough to find the Control Panel I resorted to googling “how to find control panel windows 8” to solve the riddle, so I obviously am no expert after my 20 minutes using it); but it seems like it’d be a lot “easier” to have a lot of applications running at the same time in the new interface versus earlier versions of Windows where the mountain of minimized windows on the task bar would give you an indication you had a lot of stuff open.
This speculation about copying iOS I don’t think is accurate. For one, despite all it gets maligned Windows has much more robust and sophisticated memory management than any of the mobile operating systems. Now, maybe OSX (which is Apple’s PC OS–not the same as iOS) has better memory management than Windows, I don’t know, but if Microsoft was copying memory management from Apple it’d almost certainly be from OSX not any mobile OS.
Forgive me if I’m repeating a previous post; I tried to read the whole thread first. No nitpicking, some of the stuff isn’t technically true, but it’s all true-enough.
Two things here:
The philosophy behind memory managers, at least Microsoft’s, is “unused memory is wasted memory”. This has been true since the Vista rewrite-- in fact Vista got criticized because it was too aggressive filling memory to the determent of actual user activity.
Windows 8 runs Metro-style apps in the iOS/Android fashion-- they don’t actually “quit” out of memory until the OS feels enough memory pressure to decide it’s worth unloading the app. If Metro-style Word is using 600 MB, and the OS needs that 600 MB for something else, it’ll free it. No worries, that’s normal.
The combination of these likely explains the memory “use” you’re experiencing-- the problem is that unless you understand exactly how Windows is using that memory, there’s no point in worrying about memory use. Memory takes time to fill (generally speaking, disks and Internet connections are several orders of magnitude slower than your RAM’s fill-rate), and Memory takes ZERO time to empty (emptying memory is just an accounting transaction-- you “mark” it as empty, bam, done.)
Another criticism that Vista received is that the memory manager didn’t make it clear what memory was actually “in-use” compared to memory that was “stuff in memory but not being used”. As a result a lot of people (and some professionally-developed benchmarking tools) mistakenly believed their systems were under a lot of memory pressure when in reality they weren’t.
It sounds condescending, but the best way to handle memory management in Windows is: don’t worry about it. Unless you’re actually experiencing slowdowns or excessive swapping, let Windows do its thing. If you try to “optimize” Windows, you’ll probably just make things worse.
Thus why the first reaction to, “why is my system using so much memory?” is to ask, “well, are you negatively impacted by it?” Because, all else being equal, Windows Vista and up will “use” 100% of your memory at all times. For various definitions of the word “use”.
I wrote the OP. I *don’t *actually care how much memory my system is using or check Task Manager until performance suffers. I don’t see why I’d ever bother checking otherwise.
So, one link says background apps use battery. Another says they don’t although, if poorly written, they could. And the third link spells out the philosophy of their RAM swapping without mentioning battery life.
I don’t see the confusion. Apps that can do something while in the background (e.g. music players) will use battery. Apps frozen and stuck in the background won’t, barring any bugs.
Things in RAM don’t use any battery power over and above the amount of battery power natively required to power the memory itself. In other words, RAM uses juice regardless of whether anything is in it; only apps that use CPU cycles will increase power drain.
Certainly inspired by it like Windows inspired parts of all of the Windows Phone OSes that have come and gone over the years. But iOS memory management isn’t based on desktop paradigms, and when iOS came out it couldn’t even do true multitasking. So the idea that a fully fledged PC OS like Windows copied iOS memory management is simply very suspect, and I’ve not seen any evidence for it. Normally this is where I’d ask you to provide some proof, but digging into the issue by looking into iOS and Windows 8 I’m just not seeing it at all so I’m going to say the idea that Windows 8 copied iOS memory management just isn’t very likely.
The idea that it copied OSX, which would have at least made sense also doesn’t appear to be true. Memory management has been a pretty iterative process for Microsoft and the current approach has precursors for several versions back of Windows.
Finally, your other point about copying Apple’s “instant on” are also off base. Instant on has been a generic term in computing for decades and has been possible on a variety of configurations of hardware/software for ages. (Including “true” instant on, where the entire OS runs on high speed random access memory, which is decades old for some specialty devices.) When Apple first started marketing it with the MacBook Air it was just a process akin to being able to hibernate and then load back very quickly because you were retrieving the data in the hibernate disk file with a very fast SSD. Boot-time optimizations to give common UI tasks priority and functionality before the entire OS has loaded also appear to have been bouncing around for 5+ years in various different environments as well.
Are you logging out *because *there’s swapping or performance problems? Or just because you think the memory usage is too high?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve never stated in this thread that you’re having performance problems. You just said the memory usage was “too high” and you have to log off to fix it.
Because there’s performance problems. I only check Task Manager in the event of a slowdown. I could be having high memory usage all day and I’d never notice or care unless performance were impacted.
Sorry, after I posted that I scrolled up and saw you did mention it, mea culpa.
In that case I’m afraid I don’t have any suggestions I can make without being logged into your computer while it was occurring. Personally I wouldn’t worry much about the Microsoft products, I’d wager the problem was with something more third-party. (But I could be wrong-- Excel can be a hog sometimes depending on what it has open.)