[Chinney]

This is in part an XP question, but I want to raise the question comparatively with respect to OS X.

Like many here at AN, I am forced to use Windows (XP) at work. The other day, after a long e-mail I was composing had become irretrievably corrupted (losing a considerable amount of work that could not be recovered), the IT guy I consulted told me “no wonder it had happened”: I had “too many” windows opened. At the time, I had only 4 end-user applications open: Outlook, Word, Explorer and Acrobat Reader. I had a couple of windows open in each of Explorer and Acrobat and, admittedly, about 20 e-mails open in Outlook and almost 20 documents open in Word (This is normal for me, as I often have to put together information from a large variety of source documents).

Is this actually a problem in Windows, even in XP? I am running a new 3.0 GHz Dell with 512MB RAM, so the capability of the machine should not be a problem. The computer does always seem to run slower once I have many documents open (otherwise I would probably open even more), but this is the first time since having XP that I was told by IT that I was doing something ‘wrong’ in having that many open. I thought that XP was supposed to be more capable of that.

By way of comparison, even on my old iMac G3 at home running OS X (at the limit of its capabilities) I never cared how many applications or windows I had open and I never noticed any negative effects from doing this. Now with my new iMac G5, I suppose I should have even less concern. Has anyone here had apparent problems with “too many” documents or applications open in OS X?

Was the IT guy just blowing hot air – criticizing me because he was not able to retrieve my information, or was what I was doing “too much” for XP? In general, the guy did not seem that knowledgeable, so I don’t know whether to believe him. On the other hand, maybe he is right – and if so I would conclude that this is an area where OS X is superior to XP.

[HHogan]

never ever heard of that

[bb823]

I believe that the guy was blowing hot air. I work do technical support for a tech company. I often have 8-15 windows open at a time (never less than eight.) These include Outlook 2003, and other customer account tools which draw heavily on the system. I've learned in tech support that tech agents often just try to give you ANY answer. (Not me, but we get so many calls from people who have talked to other tech agents who just tell them to call someone else.) This guy was just feeding you a line. I've had no similar problems...Plus your PC is better than the ones we run at work.

[InactionMan]

I've had my XP box at work go bonkers when I had too many windows open in Acrobat. The thing we just freeze for a while, start convulsing and then puke artifacts all over the screen. I'd just use it as an excuse to go have a smoke. And my computer at work is pretty fast. 3.2 GHz P4, gig o' ram.

[windowsblowsass]

the only time ive ever had this sort of problem is when working on a comp with ungodly low amounts of ram. thus filling up all available space and the computer slowing to a hault and sometimes applications crashing

[Wraven]

This instability issue held true in older versions of Windows, but not so much in Windows XP. That being said, 512MB is not THAT much RAM for a machine running Windows XP (especially if you are going to have a lot of windows open).

[Kickaha]

That's.... I guess to be expected.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by Chinney the IT guy I consulted told me “no wonder it had happened”: I had “too many” windows opened.

There is no such "too many" limit.

I am running a new 3.0 GHz Dell with 512MB RAM, so the capability of the machine should not be a problem.

Chances are the amount of RAM is your problem. With so many documents open, things add up fast. If you have access to the Task Manager, check its Performance tab for the PF Usage number; if it's above 512 MB, you have your problem right there.

Mac OS X has no such problem as its handles RAM much more efficiently.

[oldmacfan]

My vote is Ram, to do real work on XP, 1 gig is a minimum. Sorry your stuck at work with XP, I have 60 or so Macs I can play with. It is at home that I am forced to use a PC right now.

[atomicbartbeans]

Now with exposé, I can have anywhere from 3 to 15-20 windows open simultaneously, and still keep track of them. Never crashes.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by atomicbartbeans Now with exposé, I can have anywhere from 3 to 15-20 windows open simultaneously, and still keep track of them. Never crashes.

Not really the result of Exposé, of course, but of OS X's far more efficient RAM/VM memory management.

[AsLan^]

Just my two cents... in my experience outlook tends to distabalize the system, I use the outlook one generation before 2003 and it has crashed many times. I'm in the habit of periodically *saving* large emails to the clipboard in case of a crash.

Internet explorer also crashes a fair bit, especially when java is involved. Like some of you my work computer is some dell desktop with like a 2.8 ghz P4 and 512mb of ram.

It is a learned practice but I just dont push that computer too much... it seems to crash less that way oh for a good home brew linux system at work ! (or of course... but never going to happen in a million years... a mac!).

[atomicbartbeans]

Originally Posted by chucker Not really the result of Exposé, of course, but of OS X's far more efficient RAM/VM memory management.

Well yes, but it just wasn't practical in 10.2 and earlier, when you have as little screen real estate as I do. 1024x768 is tolerable with exposé though.

[BlueRabbit]

Originally Posted by atomicbartbeans Well yes, but it just wasn't practical in 10.2 and earlier, when you have as little screen real estate as I do. 1024x768 is tolerable with exposé though.

Well, I had a pretty good system down earlier using Cmd-Tab and Cmd-` to move quickly between applications and whatnot. Expose did help me out a lot. It's become sort of annoying though, since I keep hitting the bottom right screen corner (my F11), and it doesn't work on other computers.

[Franz Josef]

Originally Posted by atomicbartbeans Now with exposé, I can have anywhere from 3 to 15-20 windows open simultaneously, and still keep track of them. Never crashes.

It's a point well made. It's not RAM or lack of stability which stops me opening a dozen windows in XP, it's the complete loss of useability. Expose makes all of this so straightforward. At any given time I'll have 6 apps and say 12-15 windows open. All on a 12" screen. I often think Expose doesn't get the credit it deserves. It's perhaps the most impressive single feature of the Mac's UI.

[intlplby]

what is your page file size?..... OS X will use whatever is available.... in windows on the other hand you can set the page file size .... if the RAM + page file size limit is exceeded by the programs it can become unstable......

that is why when you try to open a lot of files at once (shift select and open) windows will warn you that it will become unstable.... too many windows messes with windows


in OS X if you have too many things they may not necessarily become unstable but you will start to get the beachball more often, but usually only with processor or disk usage intensive tasks..... OS X handles ram pretty well

[awilso]

I have this problem with XP, I work on Mac and then transfer stuff over to windows environments. I have found that any Excel spread sheets over 14mb will stuff XP resources. I constantly have XP crashing. I have to get clients to close down all applications in order to free enough resources for large files. Even medium size files cause issues. I have problems with freezing on XP when it has word Powerpoint, excel and Outlook all open.

The software just cannot manage the resources sufficiently well to cope with lots of activity accross programs. I tend to work in flows and transfer everything from one program to the next with <ctrl s> after every event in order that I stand some chance of keeping my work.

This is one of the simplest examples I can quote for moving to mac and never going back to windows.

I have even found the limits of windows file sizes. I have managed to produce both Word and excel files which windows cannot open, either on servers or powerful desktops. Mac is slow with these files, but manages quite easily.

I think your IT guy was right, always close down any unecessary programs when you are not using them in windows; and if you need to do a lot of work between programs, do the bits one at a time.

Write to Bill Gates and complain.

[Gargoyle]

1.) Increase your pagefile size. make it 2 or 3 gigs.
2.) Don't quit applications. For example, once you have closed all your word docs, minimize the app window.
3.) Don't keep that many Docs open. Open them get the stuff you want and close them, if you need to go back then the doc will be in your recent items list (You can set how many docs to hold in the list from the Office prefs)
4.) Increase your page file to 5 or 6 Gig - When you put an application into the background Windows SHOULD swap it out into the page file when the real RAM is needed for something else.
5.) Be patient!! Possibly the most important. You are going to be hammering the life out of your page file, and certain actions will not respond immediately. I have lost count the number of times I have seen people click an app icon (say IE) and then wait 2 seconds then click it again, and again and again. Then they get 4 IE windows up.

[ThunderPoit]

stupidest. thing. about. windows. evar.
not to derail the thread, but its just always been one of my pet peeves that in windows, double clicking an applicatoions icon launches another instance of said app, rather than taking you to the existing instance

[Batman]

With the exception of Firefox, it just takes you to the Firefox you already have running. Back on topic, your IT person didn't know what they were talking about. It was just the ammount of Ram that caused the problem (Word and Outlook are major resource hogs). However, on my own PC (AMD Athlon XP 3200+ -- Thats a 32 bit processor -- and 512 mb ram) I can somehow run Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, Coldfusion, Freehand, and Homesite (all MX 2004 versions with the exception of Freehand 9 and Coldfusion 7) all at once without crashing, or a noticable slowdown.

[DeathChill]

Originally Posted by chucker Mac OS X has no such problem as its handles RAM much more efficiently.

Uh..I think you're the only person in the world who thinks that. Try using OS X with less then 768 MB of RAM and tell me that it handles RAM efficiently. I hate having more then Safari and Conversation open at the same time because my computer just goes nuts :P

[Kickaha]

*raises hand* 256MB runs my PowerBook just fine. Let's see, right now I have Finder (duh), Safari, Mail, iChat, iTunes, QuickTime Player, Preview, TextEdit, Keynote, Terminal, SubEthaEdit, BibDesk, TeXShop, and a few utilities open... and all of those apps have 1-14 document windows active.

256MB is also the RAM allotment on my B/W G3 running MacOS X Server 10.3, with Apache, Mail Server, yadda yadda yadda. No problems there either.

Never had a freeze because the computer couldn't figure out how to handle it. OTOH, Windows' VM has *never* been intelligently designed in my experiences with it from '95 through XP, and various versions of NT along the way. From ridiculous RAM needs to disk thrashing ad nauseum, it's just too fragile.

[rasmits]

Originally Posted by Kickaha *raises hand* 256MB runs my PowerBook just fine. Let's see, right now I have Finder (duh), Safari, Mail, iChat, iTunes, QuickTime Player, Preview, TextEdit, Keynote, Terminal, SubEthaEdit, BibDesk, TeXShop, and a few utilities open... and all of those apps have 1-14 document windows active.

Thank you. I've been saying that for a long time now, and I'm glad I'm not alone.

[Kickaha]

And this isn't unusual, this is my *daily* workflow. One night I realized I had 37 SubEthaEdit windows and 9 Terminal windows going, with each shell running some process. While listening to iTunes. *shrug* Good technology is when you forget about it because it just works.

[autodata]

Just to add a slightly dissenting voice: there can be times when having a lot of windows open can cause problems. At my work we use eudora (xp) which, IIRC, writes the window information into the ini file on quit. If something happens when quitting the app and there are a lot of windows open, then not everything gets written properly, thus, corrupting the file and basically f-ing the app in a variety of creative and often unique ways.

[Chinney]

Thanks for all of the responses. A bit more RAM on my PC at work would be nice, but is entirely outside of my control. It would be 'non-standard' - which to our IT people would mean 'not allowed'.

I'll try playing around with page size file, but I don't know if I will be able to change it, as the IT people have pretty much 'locked down' the settings on our machines.

In the meantime, I will not push the poor PC too much, although I really think that 4 applications open, with maybe a total of 40 windows between them, should not be 'pushing it'. In old Windows versions, I always accepted the limitation, but I thought that this would no longer be that much of a problem in XP. As I said, I have had no problems in OS X, even on my previous iMac G3, with that many, or more, windows open.

[McSandwich]

It might be a network issue. You could try making network files available offline, forcing windows to keep a local copy (Windows will transparently keeps these up to date with the network version). This works great for large documents. To do: Right click a network drive, folder, or individual file and select ‘make available offline.'

The problem could also be the result of an Internet Explorer plugin/ActiveX problem. Nothing like a bad pdf to bring down iexplorer, and everything else with it! I’ve found that downloading PDFs and opening them directly in Adobe reader is a lot more reliable than opening within the browser window. The same applies for any MS Office docs.

[EDIT]
Nearly forgot Outlook and its tendancy to disconnect from exchange:

1. If you're keeping those outlook messages open to access attachments, save them locally before opening.
2. If you're connected to an exchange server: modify your account settings to allow off line access - tis will keep a local cache of your mailbox. The method for doing this varies between outlook versions. Go to Email Accounts or Services in the Outlook Tools menu. Modify account, and there should be an option for keeping offline copies of email.

[/EDIT]

Damned work PCs..

[zippy]

Your IT guy may very well be correct, it's just that when he said "you've got too many windows open" he probably assumed it went without saying "given the systems resources/capacity" - 512 MB of RAM isn't really a lot for a Windows machine - especially one running in on office network environment. I'm sure if it were up to him, he would love to have every machine in your organization stacked with as much RAM as it could take, but those decisions are made at higher levels.

Also, remember that it makes a big, big difference in just what kind of documents you have open. In other words, 10-15 averaged sized text documents will not use nearly as many resources as a document or two with high-res graphics/photos. If you have multiple docs loaded with photos, you'll really start to see some drag. On any PC, there's a certain amount of work that it can do for you without you seeing any performance decrease. But once you cross that line, every additional thing you try to do will make it worse.

It's a trade-off. Either open those additional items and deal with a slower PC response and a higher probaility of a crash, or spend a little more time opening and closing things but with greater response and stability.

There is no "maximum number" of apps/documents that XP can open at a time, it just depends on what your memory resources are, and how much of those resources you use up with each new item you open. If that weren't true, then we'd all still be fine with 64K of memory!!

[Kickaha]

The point is that the OS should, unless a single document exceed the physical RAM requirements, be able to handle such situations gracefully. XP doesn't.

[torifile]

I don't remember the last time having too many windows open on OS X led to a crash or increased instability. That's ludicrous. I'd hate to have to spend my time worrying about having too many windows open rather than actually doing work... Why do people choose to use Windows again???

edit: like now, I'm working on a report and I've got 3 files open in Excel, 4 in Word, Pages running, Devonthink open, Mail open. Netflix freak, adium, filemaker pro, subethaedit, MS RDC, omnigraffle, omnioutliner, iCal, iTunes and Safari all running. Never even thought twice about all that. It's probably a total of 30-40 windows... I don't think I could ever use windows again and be ok with it...