I've been awaiting my Microsoft Surface RT since preorders opened for Australia. It's been interesting ... it's certainly fair to say that Microsoft's online store has some way to go in terms of logistics. I've seen people cancel their preorders because of it ... not to mention the unfortunates whose orders were mistakenly cancelled!
But that's another story. I received mine yesterday afternoon, and have had a fun time playing with it so far. I wanted to drop a quick post about a small change that can be made to improve the overall responsiveness and performance - and probably battery life - of the Surface. I've seen some reviews around indicating the poor performance of the Surface. There aren't any hard and fast tests so far, but I found that while there was certainly some noticeable slowdown in various apps and games, it seemed to even out after a relatively short time.
Being the curious IT guy that I am, I did some poking around. At its heart, the Surface is still a Windows machine in every respect - with the various benefits and pitfalls that brings. I quickly found that the Surface RT has a page file setting that tends to be the default for any Windows machine - System Managed. The System Managed setting allows Windows to dynamically grown and shrink your page file, as it deems necessary. And generally, it's the first setting to tinker with when looking at memory pressure.
Here's the problem. You start up your system and Windows allocates a page file of minimal size. Then you load some apps. Windows begins its normal behaviour of paging some parts of memory to disk to free up physical RAM. Eventually it starts needing to grow the page file beyond its initial size. So it churns away and grows it.
Then the memory demands decrease again. Windows finds it can shrink your page file again, and does. Churney churn churn.
Then it needs to grow again...
This is a simplistic, and admittedly somewhat inaccurate picture.. but you get the drift. Paging has an effect on disk and CPU. While the Surface doesn't have a mechanical disk drive, this still has a cost - and it does show. And increased disk and CPU utilisation will have a knock on effect to battery life.
I've not done anything so scientific as to unleash performance counters to illustrate this - I'm having too much fun - but I changed my page file settings to test. I set my page file to the Recommended size - 1990MB, it was currently at around 1000MB - and rebooted.
Initial testing indicates overall improvements to system speed, including app load times. Apps such as Metrotwit, which could get somewhat slow at times, seem to have greatly improved. Games such as Jetpack Joyride seem much more fluid and responsive. And Flash video via YouTube also appears to have benefitted,
These are not posted as definitive proofs, and your mileage (and perception) may vary. So far, though, it seems to me to be a worthwhile change. I'd love to hear if others have the same result.
