Friday, November 18, 2005
The Case of the Disappearing RAM
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 11:00 AM
"So you just bought a brand new WM5 device. The box says it's got 64M of RAM. You go digging through control panels on the device and find one that says it's only got 50M. Is something wrong? Should you be worried about this? The short answers are "No" and "No." This blog entry will explain why...The primary source of this confusion stems from the fact that the control panel which shows your RAM usage only counts RAM that you have any control over. That is to say, it only shows running applications. There are other uses for RAM, and such things are hidden from you. As end users, there's nothing you can do about them, so why display them in the panel? Now you could make the argument that you'd still like to see a listing of the RAM you can't directly use. The WM5 designers disagree. I personally don't have a strong opinion on the matter one way or the other."
An interesting article from Mike Calligaro triggered by my request to my MVP lead for more information on the RAM setup of Windows Mobile 5. I was planning on a post to discuss this issue, and wanted an official response from Microsoft as to why the memory issue was so confusing. Mike has delivered in spades with a detailed article.
I was initially really positive about the new ROM/RAM setup (some may recall me saying that 64 MB would be enough), but it's really ugly how much RAM is used up after boot. I should have known better, because if you have a desktop PC with 512 MB of RAM, it's not like you have that much to use after boot - the OS itself needs RAM to operate, and Windows Mobile 5 is no different in this regard.
I received a JasJar two weeks ago, and it's my first experience using a phone edition of Windows Mobile 5. It has 64 MB of RAM, but only 50.16 is listed as the total. On a freshly hard reset device with only my Exchange data on it and only GPRS turned on, 22.79 MB is used up. So of 64 MB total, only 27.37 is available to the user. I was using it for about 30 minutes, doing PIM + email + web (WiFi active), and I was down to 9 MB RAM free. This hardly seems like a power-user device, does it? I'd be curious to know if there are any JasJar users running GPS or other memory-intensive applications, and how well it works.
An interesting article from Mike Calligaro triggered by my request to my MVP lead for more information on the RAM setup of Windows Mobile 5. I was planning on a post to discuss this issue, and wanted an official response from Microsoft as to why the memory issue was so confusing. Mike has delivered in spades with a detailed article.
I was initially really positive about the new ROM/RAM setup (some may recall me saying that 64 MB would be enough), but it's really ugly how much RAM is used up after boot. I should have known better, because if you have a desktop PC with 512 MB of RAM, it's not like you have that much to use after boot - the OS itself needs RAM to operate, and Windows Mobile 5 is no different in this regard.
I received a JasJar two weeks ago, and it's my first experience using a phone edition of Windows Mobile 5. It has 64 MB of RAM, but only 50.16 is listed as the total. On a freshly hard reset device with only my Exchange data on it and only GPRS turned on, 22.79 MB is used up. So of 64 MB total, only 27.37 is available to the user. I was using it for about 30 minutes, doing PIM + email + web (WiFi active), and I was down to 9 MB RAM free. This hardly seems like a power-user device, does it? I'd be curious to know if there are any JasJar users running GPS or other memory-intensive applications, and how well it works.
