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Windows 7 unlike the old windows XP takes up a relly good chunk of memory and processing power. On varios mashines with windows 7 i worked with, there was always at least half of memory full and thats without any memory heavy programs or games running. if you add firefox with 30 tabs open while running a game, if your system has 2-3 gigs, the game or firefox, one of them will crash from lack of memory. Also, the processing power it takes if you are doing something is also pretty good unless you have a a 3.4 quadcore.

Yet for some weird unknown reason, other than firefox and some games crashing when short on memory, the Windows7 system itself is insanley stable. The OS never freezes, or crashes, or slows down even on the weakest systems.

I recentley fixed an MSI netbook (think of it as macbook air because this netbook looked almost exactly like macbook air with an MSI logo) This netbook was weaker than most todays netbooks. It had a single core 1.4 GHz core solo CPU which was nearly ALWAYS at 100% load when you are doing stuff (cpu didnt get hot at all i am surprised... still its only 1.4ghz)It had 2 gigs of DDR2 memory (my other windows 7 had troble with 4 gigs. it wasnt enough to run a game and have 30 firefox tabs open, upgrading to 8 gigs solved my problem) The memory was always at least 1 gig full, most of the time 1.5 gigs. Still, Windows 7 ran VERY WELL on it, it was super fast, and didnt freeze crash or even slow down once and i was doing a lot of crazy stuff for about 10 hours straight, Defragging, disk check, updates, windows updates, antivirus updates, full AV scan, downloaded and installed programs, mesed around in the registy, used ccleaner to fix the registry, and delete gigs of internet junk in the temp folders, formatted disk partitions (exept for drive C: lol) anyway, i did a bunch of screing around with the system and maintenence work usually with a few downloads or a virus scan or a win update running in the backround. tried puttin as much pressure on the system as i could (with whatever was avaliable for me at the time which is not much just what was on the laptop). The CPU activity was off the charts but the bottom didnt even get a little hot, and the memory was 80% full much of the time (if i had firefox with 10 tabs open)... still Win7 ran smooth, reacted swiftly, didnt freeze or crash.

some of the systems i have which had windows 7 at some point, i reinstalled Windows XP. While it took a lot less resourses it didnt run as smooth as 7. It froze up sometimes, once in a while it would slow down if some process in the backround starts. Altho, i cant complain on win XP performance, it was still satisfying, but Still puzzles me if win XP takes up at least 1/3 les of what win 7 hogs, it still gets small hickups and slowdowns once in a while here and there while and often it runs a bit slow with some programs. But win 7 on the same computer ran faster, smoother with no bumps at all and noticabley more stable than XP.

Now i still choose XP over 7 sometimes for the compatibility of older programs that dont run on win7.

So can someone tell me... Whats the secret of windows 7 that seemes to make it run better and more stable than XP most of the time even tho it takes up a lot more resourses???

i think, 7 just knows how to manage the memory better than XP. But in case i am wrong. Is there anyone who can answer my question?

I'm pretty sure it's memory management and a better prioritization scheme which makes Win7 super stable, my PC only has 2GB of RAM and it will run almost everything at once without problems.

Also, as for the laptop not getting hot, that's due to the hardware being good quality, windows doesn't manage the temperature things run at.

It makes use of the memory instead of wasting it

7 is a prime number.

Because a lot of computers now have 2GB or more. Microsoft has probably done a lot of speed-memory tradeoffs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-time_tradeoff

These are when you speed things up by making your programs use more RAM.

Some examples:

Caching data in the RAM instead of loading it from the hard drive each time its used.

Precalculating and storing results in RAM so the calculations don't have to be done again.

Unless the OS is using more CPU time than it needs to. Which would create more heat.

Sooo, uhh, i'll trade you this shoe for some space-time

feeling like my grandpappy, i'm still using XP.

for compatibility issues search for my username and find my win 7 post, believe its in geek culture somewhere under windows 7 compibility with win 7 it might be of great help to you if you do not know half of it all.

In regards to win 7 using more resources and being speedy...

A good analogy would be, consider Windows XP a bowl of Spaghetti, with all the drivers for devices (which you are constantly using as the OS calls these drivers to make the devices work- gpu, cpu, memory management etc) as well as functions completely integrated into the OS coding, if the driver fails to complete its sequence, ta da da daaa BSOD.

However, I think Microsoft went back to their golden days back at redmond heres some images http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/gallery/campus.mspx , I have tried looking for the story but can not find it right now and im getting busy... so in short they purchased their home at Redmond in sectors that they could sell off in times of difficulty, aka modular. It is safe to say the times of difficulty never came, but the originality of the sectors remains...

So basically, the reason why Windows 7 doesnt BSOD (it still does but its red for the 3 occasions when I was overclocking my GPU - else has never happened) each section of the OS is modular away from the core OS (in theory) and if a driver fails to complete its sequence it simply shuts down the driver (you might have seen this where you get a small popup near the clock saying driver has failed and has recovered) and restarts it, which is a feature I just love of win 7 it heals itself not sure if you get this on home or starter versions but I have the ultimate x64 edition.

im not having a good week, so just get the picture lol and let me know if you want me to explain better lol...

A modular design as Mac OS has been for years. Way to finally catch up MS!

as far as i am concerned. win 7 is still structured the same from what i have seen.

When i checked out how BSD was built at a friends house, i was amazed how orgonised the OS was, i could see the structure of it and could picture how it worked at low level. I was trained in school as a windows specialist for 4 years and the low level of the os is still pretty abstract to me. the best way i imagined structure of windows was like this.

you take the HDD. you format it. You dump the partition tables, file system, and the boot record on it. on top of that you dump a bunch of core system files like ntlrd and the kernel (i think ) and some other stuff. then you take a bunch of other system files, you dump them into a bucket labelled system 32. you toss that bucket into a bigger bucket called WINDOWS anong with a bunch of other system crap. then you toss the windows bucket into the main HDD bucket, along with the registry and mix everything in the bucket with it. then you dump the users bucket in there which eventually gets mixed in with the program files bucket which you dump.And Vyala you got yourselsf a nice BUCKET OF WINDOWS!! umm yummy.

so i think windows 7 is just really good at managing and using memory and adapting to the hardware.

When i watched how my friend assembled a BSD system, i got an idea that someone should make a custom windows distro which instead of normal automatic install, you have to manually assemble it from scratch just like Linux or BSD