Seems like you can’t win all the time with Windows. According to data gathered under Devil Mountain’s Exo.performance.network, a community-based network, 86% of PCs running Windows 7 regularly exceeded 90-95% of their available RAM. This pretty much just leaves the OS chugging on virtual memory.

Caveat though:

“Barth acknowledged that XPnet’s data couldn’t determine whether the memory usage was by the operating system itself, or an increased number of applications, but said that Devil Mountain would start working on finding which is the dominant factor in increased memory use.”

Seems to me though that they could compare an identical application load under Vista and XP and see the memory usage in those to determine if it’s the OS or the applications; maybe it’s just a crapload of bloatware going on behind the scenes in Win7.

Has anyone noticed a lot of pagefile usage in Windows 7? Maybe a lot of slowdown? Did you buy an SSD to largely fix the problem?

See the original article here.

UPDATE: A rebuttal of the previous article from Ars Technica is out; see it here.

UPDATE!!!: This keeps getting weirder; the guy who was listed as the CTO for Devil Mountain Software apparently DOESN’T EXIST. Adding the rebuttal from Ars Technica to the article, there’s serious doubt in the truthfulness of the above claims. My cold-addled brain can’t make heads or tails of this, I’ll be back after a good nap and cough syrup, but this is some whacked out stuff.