Memory use myths
Customization software is not resource intensive
Sunday, June 5, 2005 by Frogboy | Discussion: OS Customization
I'm not sure where the myth began. But somewhere down the line, a false belief has turned into pseudo-fact amongst some people that customization software uses a lot of memory. That's never been the case. Not even in the beginning.
At the dawn of Windows customization, software had to run on Windows 95 which only had 128K (that's kilobytes) of GDI resources. Customization software ate up a lot of those GDI resources since they were reserved for the user interface. But even in 1995, 16K of memory was trivial. It's just that early versions of Windows were so limited in their GDI resources that it was a problem.
But Windows 2000 and Windows XP have never had any such problem. And yet, we still see some uninformed, but vocal, user claim that <Program X> is "bloated" and uses a "ton" of memory. Those people come in two forms: The guy who really has no idea what he's talking about and the guy who thinks 10 megabytes of memory is a "ton" of memory.
The former guy is annoying because he matches his ignorance with his prolific posting. The latter guy makes you wonder if their source of income is mom's allowance or something. I can buy a 256 meg stick of memory for my PC for around $20.
So let's get this out of the way: Desktop customization programs do NOT use much memory.
Here's WindowBlinds wbload.exe process use:
That's 576K.
Here's DesktopX:
That's only a couple megabytes of memory and it's running a useful object in this instance.
I could go on through a variety of programs both made by Stardock and made by third parties. None of them are "memory hogs". You can certainly load up enough stuff with something like DesktopX to make it use a ton of memory. Graphics, animation, etc. has to be stored somewhere. But that's not the desktop customization's fault any more than it's Photoshop's fault if the user loaded a gigabyte sized image.
So next time someone tries to claim that some desktop customization program is "bloated" or something, point them here.
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Reply #62 Thursday, September 22, 2005 12:50 AM
Reply #63 Thursday, September 22, 2005 1:03 AM
| Oh by the way Windowvblinds uses less memory then even Windows classic or explorer itself. |
I doubt that. Highly.
Reply #64 Thursday, September 22, 2005 1:23 AM
Reply #65 Thursday, September 22, 2005 12:22 PM
My question is this though: why does Stardock keep writing stuff about memory usage. Okay so it only uses 600k of RAM. I could care less about how much RAM it uses and a whole lot more about how it affects overall system performance.
Reply #66 Thursday, September 22, 2005 1:43 PM
You just have to find a blend of customisations that works for you and any figures you come up with are really only meaningful to you in your situation.
Reply #67 Friday, September 23, 2005 12:18 AM
Reply #68 Monday, October 31, 2005 4:43 PM
wincustomize browser maximized:8,400k
wincustomize browser minimized:1,904k
still good numbers...but what do I care, I have a gig to use.
Reply #69 Monday, October 31, 2005 4:50 PM
I agree here in that while getting my father's laptop to perform and still have 50-60 mb free, I found that running windowblinds made a difference of about 1 mb over classic view. This number is with no desktop background, running XP SP2, StealthOS with transparent taskbar, and PointChrome Cursor. Classic gave me 149.5 mb used, this is with EZArmor running and @ idle. StealthOS gave me a steady 151.3. Considering the difference in looks, I'll go with the StealthOS over classic view anyday.
Anyway, it's not just a matter of how much memory you have and use, graphic card, CPU L2 cache, PCI latencies, and more come into play once you go beyond the shell OS.
Reply #70 Friday, August 25, 2006 6:43 AM
Reply #71 Friday, August 25, 2006 6:45 AM
Reply #74 Sunday, November 11, 2007 1:20 AM
A picture says a thousand words.
I'd just like to add that without customisation XP can look pretty ordinary and even a little shoddy so I really like that we have the option to change th UI, but sometimes it can affect memory usage whatever the EXPERTS say.
Some of us have other priorities so it would be nice if IconX could optimise its efficiancy for the people who use it.
Reply #75 Sunday, November 11, 2007 6:30 AM
I doubt that. Highly.
I don't. Explorer uses approx. 38,000k on my comp. Windowblinds and ObjectDock together only use approx. 5,100k. that's a big difference.
Reply #76 Sunday, November 11, 2007 6:42 AM
Of course, I only have 2gb of ram. Maybe someday I'll fill up those other 2 ram slots..... especially since wb is drawing sooooo much of my memory.... (see post #75)
Reply #77 Sunday, November 11, 2007 6:53 AM
Of course time and technological advancment will heal these issues, but it won't stop sarcasm.
Reply #79 Sunday, November 11, 2007 7:48 AM
Reply #80 Sunday, November 11, 2007 8:51 AM
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Reply #61 Wednesday, September 21, 2005 8:45 PM
We've certainly come a long way since Magic Workbench, a replacement set of icons for the ancient Amiga which alone hit the performance of standard Amigas just using a few extra icons.