Windows 8 Metro apps behaviour

[Dos_Box]

I thought I'd share this little find with you. I was experimenting with the pre-installed Metro apps, and to be honest many don't seem to work, or work fully and are there to simply look pretty. Anyway, I'd opened several and went to task manager to see their impact on the system,, and saw this:

task manger.JPG

That's right. It appears that if an app is not 'in focus' it has its system processes suspended. A nice power and cpu saving trick

[nephilim]

whilst it may be suspended it still utilises the RAM. MS said on a webchat that they are looking at making it use about 1mb of RAM whilst in suspension so the programs can be kept open but inactive and have a minimal impact on the machine. So those with tablets can make the most of the multifunctions!!

[pritchardavid]

1MB would be nice, I don't like to open many of them up at the moment, cause it annoys me, knowing its use a fair bit of RAM up

[localzuk]

Question is, does it kill off the suspended applications that are oldest in the list when it needs the RAM from them for programs in use? ie. like Android does?

[Dos_Box]

Not that I've seen, but I suspect that as this is actually a fully fledged version of Windows it will keep them running, although it may treat Metro apps diiferently perhaps, I'm not sure. I have been running Outlook 2010 quite sucessfully on it as well as a couple of other pieces of software such as DropBox and the Windows Live Suite. I think people should take note that this isn't just a mobile operating system, but a 'real' OS, but with Metro apps being treated differently to regular apps and processes then perhaps Microsoft have taken a desision to seperate the two into distinct types and treat them in seperate ways. That would actually be quite a smart thing to do.
Oh, and having the EduGeek RSS feed as the only feed into the desktop news notifier has made it so much more usable! RSS Feeds

[nephilim]

What will happen is when the programs which are suspended and machine needs RAM, it will put them to the virtual memory until the RAM is read. However you would need something like CAD or PhotoShop to utilise all RAM when that happens.