Any tips to reduce the memory footprint of MS-Vista and XP?

[eminemence]

Hi All,
I have MS windows Vista one a HP laptop(Intel Core 2 duo 1.83 ghz and 2 gb ram) & xp on acer laptop(AMD dual core 2.2 Ghz & 1gb ram). I recently downloaded windows xp black edition from a torrent and installed it in VM and noticed that it takes a mere 95 MB after bootup!!! I would like to have similar small memory footprints for my vista machine (currently taking up 1.12 gb after bootup) & xp (currently taking up 450 MB after bootup).
Any tips to get similar results??

[Disc_Junkie]

^^^ Don't discuss here about torrents and pirated softwares.

[eminemence]

Well you seem to have misunderstood the question : How to reduce memory footprint in Vista and XP?
It's not How to download Vista and XP from torrents!!!!!!

[Disc_Junkie]

He has download through torrent but the rules says not to discuss anything related to pirated softwares. If I misunderstood it then you can help.

[eminemence]

But the version of Vista and Xp on the laptops is 100% legal.
Does that soothe your nerves?

[eminemence]

Originally Posted by Disc_Junkie

^^^ If that is then, why don't you increase the size of the page file, it will save your memory footprints.

It's already a whole 2 gb for the 1gb xp laptop and 4gb for the 2gb vista laptop.

[Disc_Junkie]

If you have Aero effects turned on in Vista, it takes a lot of memory. Turn down the lights and see what happens.

[eminemence]

Just to mention, if it does not make you crazy.(Caution:mentioning pirated software ahead.)
The XP black edition had a memory footprint of 95MB against that of 435 MB of the legal XP install on my laptop.
I have turned off all the fancy stuff and tweaked most of the settings, but unable to understand as to how can we really get such a small footprint!!!

[Disc_Junkie]

^^^ Install the legal ones

[voljin1987]

Download this software 'minimem'.. You can use it to reduce it to reduce the memory footprint of individual softwares. As for your os a fresh installation will always have a smaller footprint than an older installation. Try defraging your comp or better defrag your pagefile using 'pagedefrag'... Also download 'autoruns' for a comprehensive look at all you startup programs... Me using legal WinXP (dunno if same applies for Vista) and after all dis got a memory footprint of 134MB..

[eminemence]

Originally Posted by voljin1987

Download this software 'minimem'.. You can use it to reduce it to reduce the memory footprint of individual softwares. As for your os a fresh installation will always have a smaller footprint than an older installation. Try defraging your comp or better defrag your pagefile using 'pagedefrag'... Also download 'autoruns' for a comprehensive look at all you startup programs... Me using legal WinXP (dunno if same applies for Vista) and after all dis got a memory footprint of 134MB..

Thanks for the constructive input. Will try out and post the result here soon.

[voljin1987]

Hey btw are you getting the 95 MB footprint while using anti-virus/firewall softwares...

[eminemence]

Nopes, it does not have AV, but assuming worst case, that AV takes up another 100MB still and a few more software taking up another 100 MB of RAM, I still think that tweaking is possible in my case. So lets see what else can I knockoff from the software installed list.

[eminemence]

After some searching around found the main culprits:
1. Indexing service.
2. Windows themes.
And the super villian of them all:
3. SuperFetch - This one was eating up memory progressively.
Stop these and other unwanted services in Vista and a decent amount of memory frees up.
If you want to reclaim a bit of disk space, disable System Restore - It's an old trick since Win2k.
--eminemence.