Sunday, July 8, 2007

Running Windows XP without EXPLORER.EXE

One big process running in Windows XP system is Explorer.exe. It's actually the Windows XP GUI, identical with Window Manager in Unix/Linux system. This process is CPU and Memory hog. It is possible, however, not to run this process to make Windows XP run faster :)

Install Windows XP inside Virtual Machine :)

Below is the XP task manager screen capture :




I haven't done any fine tuning on the Windows XP virtual machine. So further memory/cpu utilization reduction is still possible (i.e. not running indexing service, etc.).

Linux also has much better memory management. If you are running many Windows applications, for example below I am running 6 active windows applications : taskmgr, 2x large visio, 2x large powerpoint, 1x large word documets, I am consuming full 256MB DRAM (seen from taskmgr), but only 34MB DRAM actually used from Linux side..... So far no paging file is utilized. Every process running purely on DRAM !





The largest memory utilization on Linux is XGL, almost 200MB, because I am running Compiz Fusion with many virtual desktop.

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