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

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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??

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

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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!!!!!!

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. *www.mysmiley.net/imgs/smile/animated/anim_09.gif

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

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Disc_Junkie said:
^^^ 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.

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

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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!!!

^^^ Install the legal ones

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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..

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voljin1987 said:
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.

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

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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.

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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.