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Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

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Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#501

Post by trinix912 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #68
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #13

...you know, I keep reading all this stuff about memory prices, and it does suck, but memory is still much cheaper per gigabyte than it was ~15 years ago. Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway. For years, everyone kept saying it was fine th…

We had modern programming toolkits that traded some efficiency for ease of use 20 years ago, along with GPU compositing for maximum smoothness. And that's when Vista came out requiring a whole 1GB to run properly. And other than doubling for 64GB that didn't change through 7, 8, 8.1, 10. Electron was never a great idea but more and more basic things keep moving to it and the result is a disaster. When you use it for…

The sad part is that we actually used to have better desktop RAD tooling than we do now. I’m thinking about Borland Delphi, C++ Builder, etc., it was pretty easy to make a decent desktop app.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#502

Post by Const-me »

inigyou wrote: post #338
Const-me wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but many modern computers are using unified memory. On such systems all memory is almost equal, despite often reported differently. For example, on my 5 years old laptop with integrated AMD GPU, windows 10 calculator in default state uses 33 MB system RAM, 9.6 MB dedicated VRAM. Maximized to FullHD screen, same app uses 36 MB system RAM, 13 MB dedicated VRAM. Maybe the OS counts VRAM as active private working s…

Before Windows Vista, Windows apps normally didn't have framebuffers. There was one framebuffer for the whole screen, and apps drew into it. That's why dragging another window over a non-responsive window left a "slime trail" - the non-responsive window wasn't redrawing parts of itself when the window covering them moved away.

Before Vista, we did not have window previews in task bar and alt+tab. We didn’t have a good multimedia framework based on the hardware codecs: media foundation arriving with Vista wasn’t a coincidence. It was hard to capture and encode desktop for screen recording and presentations: despite MS only added desktop duplication API in Win8, technically Vista and Win7 graphics stacks could already do that, MS just neglected. Also, these aero translucency visuals in Vista and Win7 were nice, until Win8 ruined everything.

All that stuff would be hard to impossible with the older GDI architecture and no desktop compositor process.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#503

Post by rk06 »

the main problem with windows is that its applications are integrated in windows and can not be disabled and replaced by better software trivially.

nor is there anyone incentivised to improve customer experience for windows. it baffles me how bad windows search is. there are multiple tools out there which do a far better job.

same for file explorer.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#504

Post by vor_ »

Hobadee wrote: post #424

> A new report shows Windows 11's built-in Weather app can consume more than 1 GB of RAM. By comparison, Apple's native Weather app on macOS uses roughly five times less memory under similar conditions. Can we also be talking about how the Mac version uses 200MB apparently!? Why is a weather app using any more than like 10-20MB or so of RAM!? Load a couple icons into memory, maybe some background image or pattern, an…

For one thing, Apple Weather displays hi-DPI animations for weather conditions.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#505

Post by rk06 »

firefoxd wrote: post #36

This took me down a rabbit whole. Why can a simple single purpose app not be just a couple megabytes if not less? The popular options are electron 100MB+, or embedding python3 in your executable which is at least 40MB. But if you build it natively, you should have all of Microsoft tools at your disposition, dlls and such. In theory, this should allow you to make a 1 mb app or less. But in practice, it's the worse opt…

it can be. you just need competence and incentive for it.

see File pilot as an example of what is possible when competent software engineer attempts it

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#506

Post by Y-bar »

This reminds me of the JetBrains Toolbox App, which is a tray/system utility used to keep IDE:s up-to-date and provide a good location to launch them from. Not much more than that. https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox-app/

It is currently using 680 MiB RAM on Mac OS 26.6, this is more than Microsoft Teams is using on my system. How do a group of what should be a competent programmers with access to good tools even manage to bloat this up so much?

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#507

Post by da_chicken »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #448
isgb wrote: post #436

That’s pretty amazing, credit to Microsoft. Modern-day weather models are pretty complex and running these kinds of simulations can be pretty demanding.

I also like the compatibility telemetry that uses all my CPU. Seriously, this is a problem since late Windows 7 or early Windows 10 I believe and I have seen so many systems wasting resources and running hot in summer for no reason at all. Not only is this unwanted spyware, it is extremely inefficient spyware.

They just recently fixed an issue where the start menu would render slowly. The solution was to let the CPU utilization and frequency spike immediately when opening the start menu instead of slowly ramping up.

Of course, that means Microsoft just admitted that Windows 11 needs the full CPU speed of a modern processor to render the start menu, which, IMX, is something that they were able to do smoothly under Windows 95 running on a 133 MHz Pentium and 4 MB of main memory without any 3d acceleration.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#509

Post by DaedalusII »

whatever1 wrote: post #432
ndriscoll wrote: post #37

My gaming PC that I built in January 2006 that IIRC I used to simultaneously run Battlefield 2, Trillian, Xfire, Thunderbird, and Winamp with a 1680x1050 monitor had 1 GB of total system RAM.

2 years ago I stated that we should stop worrying about software consuming a lot of ram. I had just built my pc with 128gb of ddr5 ram spending less than an average android phone (I think like $300). I would like to retract that statement. Thanks.

this post was sponsored by SK Hynix

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#510

Post by lp4v4n »

jijji wrote: post #472
harshreality wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because programmers in 2006 didn't understand programming. They didn't understand how to make their software better . Real programming means writing your own javascript glue, pulling in hundreds of supply-chain-compromised js libraries that you never inspect or profile, and running the whole thing in a browser engine, while making sure to store all state in the cloud. The modern breed of programmers who don't…

rust programs are a lot of times faster and orders of magnitude safer than C and C++ counterparts... where is your data to support your assertion that rust programs use more resources than C and C++ programs?

>rust programs are a lot of times faster [...] than C and C++ counterparts

Troll post? Or has fanboyism really gone this far?

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