However, the situation gets worse when I opened mspaint and took the screenshot! Now, a low memory warning popped up. The bad thing is: There are still 1777 MB which are used for caching, according to the Task Manager! On the other hand, it reports a page file usage of 2851 / 2939 MB, and shows a graph with 2.36 of 3.00 GB Physical RAM usage – rather strange?!

Update: This post is now almost two years old, but it’s ranked pretty high in the search engines so I felt it was worth an update. Bottom line: don’t disable virtual memory. If you didn’t do so, it might have been disabled by a third party software or by accident. To re-enable, go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual Memory. You might have to delete the existing file, pagefile.sys.

Windows is pretty smart when it comes to using resources effectively, but there is quite a bit of dark magic involved. The swap file plays an important role. If you really know what you’re doing, however, you can disable the warning.

In another thread (thanks Arthur), users report issues when using TrueCrypt, so TrueCrypt users might want to head over to Arthur’s. I haven’t checked out Microsoft Dynamic Cache Service, but I haven’t really felt the need. End Update

I see the point in caching frequently used files in the RAM, but an easy way to control this caching behavior would be nice. Due to the fact that I have installed 1GB of Intel Turbo Memory anyways, caching should have a very low priority in my case, I think.

Worst of all, I kinda saw it coming: I acquired a habit of ultra-multi-tasking when using an XP machine with 3GB of RAM … that was almost three years ago, and now that programs have a considerably larger memory consumption, I need more RAM – which is not possible unless you switch to 64 bit, which is fraught with its own perils, especially when it comes to laptops.

NOTE: I have virtual memory disabled completely.

o On 120 dpi, 11pt Segoe UI (Windows Vista’s default UI font) will have a far too large space after the small letter ‘m’.

o Many 3D-applications, including some SDKs, Samples, etc. are not DPI-Aware (also includes Doom 3!). These have to take DPI-Settings into account when projecting from/to the screen.

With more and more high-resolution devices, software vendors should start testing their applications for DPI-Awareness. It’s not a big issue in most cases, it seems.

Very positive impressions so far: Keyboard (no surprise), loudspeakers

 First negative impression: The advanced dock has an integrated fan which is very loud!