How can you compare Windows 7 to Windows Server 2008 R2 with a different set of installed programs? If your Dad's machine is using 64 processes, I would expect his PC to use more RAM, with your Server using 38 processes (less) - this to me is normal but doesn't prove that Windows Server 2008 R2 is more minimalistic in its resource usage.

You make a valid point. I thought it was a bit unusual that my computer was using 26 more processes than mine on startup despite me disabling everything on startup. I went in to each individual programs user interface and went under the general tab or whatever and unchecked them from starting up. For some reason they were taking priority over MSCONFIG. Now that I rebooted the processes went down to 42. I counted 65 services running on his machine, compared to only 54 on my machine. Windows 7 has the extra services running with Media Center, HomeGroup, Superfetch this probably explains the reduced footprint.

Msconfig doesn't catch all startup items. Try Sysinternals Autoruns instead:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 63902.aspx

Also, the way I see it, your dad's Win7 machine is making better use of the available RAM, leaving only 1/3 of it idle, compared to 3/4 on your machine.

TIP: Optimize system for background processes instead of programs. I've got better performance using this method. Windows server systems are optimized for this, as most servers are running those services to manage the server and cutting those has caused lags for other programs.

Also people using server 2008 can try using many system management tools.

I also have a windows 7 professional and a windows 7 home premium systems and I have noticed that even on windows 7 the performance drains were pretty much the same as windows vista. I still have a windows vista x64 home premium based HP notebook and it has been stable. You just have to know how to use it.

The differences in both OSes on the backend have been minimal after extensive testing. Most of the changes were in the GUI and some programs like windows media player got an interface overhaul that was not very positively received due to removal of the ID3 tag editors, the miniplayer, and the relocation of the EQ's menu. However on the plus side you got aero peek, aero shake, and better UAC controls, as well as improved device support. The taskbar has ben both praised and criticized.

I pretty much have to say that windows 7 is what windows vista should have been.

It has some great enhancements, especially in the Sold State Disk support section, and the file management stack. Just a little taste of the WinFS feature windows longhorn was going to have that Microsoft was excited about! I am hopeful we shall get the full WinFS experience in the upcoming windows 8 release!

As evidenced by the lack of Superfetch. But my beef with Superfetch is that it relies on the hard drive as a caching medium. So on machines that are running Windows 7 with less than 4GB of RAM (for example my dad's drive) when the free memory nears 0 and the user wants to call on application that hasn't been written into the Superfetch database, the hard drive must page out to allow new data in memory, and thrashing occurs. This type of event is most common for gamers. I've noticed there are quite a few World of Warcraft forums online that recommend disabling Superfetch when playing the game. It makes sense. Think of all the maps in that game that have lots of textures, objects, etc. The game is constantly going to be using a large block of memory and if Superfetch is constantly draining your free memory to 0 disk thrashing will occur and the game might crash a result. Now under normal operations when you are just surfing the web, playing music, writing a document in Word, Superfetch is a useful service. But personally I would rather have a large chunk of physical memory available than a large chunk of cached virtual memory available. Readyboost on the other hand that comes with Windows 7 is a completely different story. It is the superfetch of flash memory. Unlike your hard drive, your flash drive has no moving parts and reading/writing data to it becomes much faster and is thus much more useful. Unfortunately for me, even if ReadyBoost was available on R2 my USB flash drive isn't Readyboost-compatible. As a workaround I am using eboostr, which is a disk caching technology that allows me to use my flash drive as a caching device. I have allocated 1512MB of memory out of 2GB on my flash drive and it has currently filled 79% of its cache, with a random read speed of 20,586 KB/s. In a way if you think about it this is the best of both worlds on Windows Server 2008 R2. The eboostr program keeps all of my commonly used programs into memory, while the lack of Superfetch on Server allows my pool of physical memory on my machine to remain high as well. The difference with my machine is that it doesn't rely on the hard drive for caching and disk thrashing is not a problem.

Indrek, have you ever considered the following alternative?

1. Change Superfetch so it caches boot files only (not applications)
2. Use Readyboost/eBoostr as your caching medium instead

This way you can reduce hard disk thrashing while using a higher-speed medium for caching and with Superfetch caching your boot files your Windows 7 machine will still boot up fast.

@ Halliday, Thanks much for the valuable Superfeatch insights. I may try that eboostr utility out!

Thanks. The concept of Superfetch for the most part is beneficial. I think if you have ample memory then disk thrashing isn't really a problem, for example on those machines with 4GB or more. It's becoming more common theme to see OEM machines in stores that have 6GB of memory or more. I've left my computer idle for 36 hours straight, logged into Windows, and then clicked the programs I frequently use and they load just as fast as if i was running windows 7 with superfetch. Eboostr is more like Readyboost if anything. If you check the website you can see that it was built to run on XP as a readyboost replacement. Trust me, it will shave your boot time 10 seconds atleast and applications will respond faster than before. For Windows Server 2008 R2 workstations I personally highly recommend eBoostr.

Good! I tried 12 long hours and it equaled one sleepless night over getting SuperFetch to work and I gave up.

I'm no expert, but if the user wants to call a new app and there's no free RAM, Windows is supposed to use the RAM that's on standby instead. For instance, my laptop right now has 188 MB of RAM free and 1773 MB on standby. Thus the total amount of RAM immediately available for new programs is 1961 MB. Only when that is exhausted does paging occur.

On my machine I haven't noticed any significant hard drive thrashing during normal use. I guess I could try running Visual Studio 2010, Photoshop CS5, a few virtual machines and whatnot at the same time, but that's a rather contrived situation, in my case at least.

Having gone from WS2008 R2 to Win7 on the same machine (with a practically identical set of installed programs), I think I prefer Win7 in terms of application startup performance - more of the things I use daily start up faster. At least that's how I perceive it, I haven't done any actual measurements. And of course, YMMV.

Textures and such are kept in video RAM, though, and thus don't clash with Superfetch. Unless of course you have an integrated video card, but in that case you're unlikely to be playing modern games with high (V)RAM requirements anyway.

And again, RAM in standby will (or at least should) be released when an application requires more RAM and there's none free. In the situation you described above, with WoW, as long as the game's RAM usage remains relatively constant, there's nothing wrong with Superfetch populating the rest of the RAM rather than letting it sit idle. If WoW suddenly requires more RAM, then some of Superfetch's cache is cleared and made available to the game. Now if your game required more RAM than you have available (free + standby), then you'd want to look at closing some programs or even buying more RAM (or not playing WoW ), so as not to force the system to clear RAM that's in use by other programs (which would have to be paged to hard drive first and would thus cause thrashing).

I don't see why Superfetch on its own would cause any paging - all data in its cache came straight from the hard drive, so there's no need to write it back to the drive, thus the RAM used by the cache can simply be cleared and allocated to another process immediately.

Indrek, not to mention the Windows page scheduler prioritizes which programs should and shouldn't be paged out. So for programs and you use on a daily basis will always have a chunk of standby memory. This is nice feature most of the times.

As far as the gaming part of my discussion, it is true that if you have a video card with ample vRAM then you don't have to depend on the system memory as much and thus will see a significant FPS gain, but as far as superfetch is concerned it can become a nightmare when you reboot your system. The thing I don't like about Superfetch is that is becomes a disk caching monster, you can't exclude a particular application from a list. My brother for example is a big MMPORG guy (Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, Aion, Age of Conan, Runescape) u name it he plays it. Now think of all the small chunks of data Superfetch has preloaded into memory on the hard drive. Sure the chunks are small but when you add the contents of the entire game it fills your hard drive. The good thing is that when you need to reload the game at a later time it is very fast and responsive. But when you need to restart the computer, disk activity goes nuts. I'm being completely truthful here and I take you trust my word, I kid you not, my brother has an Core i7 920, 9GB of DDR3 (1333MHz), two GTX 295s, and 2TB of HDD space and his Windows 7 machine takes 59 seconds to show the desktop. An 8 thread machine with 9GB of DDR3 on Windows 7 takes 59 seconds? I suggested that he change Superfetch to cache boot file only and use eBoostr to cache programs and exclude all his MMPORG games from the list. His result? 27 seconds.