Windows 8 Uses Less CPU/Memory Than Windows 7

For those of you who've played around with Windows 8 Developer Preview will know that it uses less RAM than Windows 7. To demonstrate, Microsoft used a low powered netbook which had just 1GB of RAM, booted Windows 7 SP1 and the Windows 8 Developer Preview and after they had both been at idle for a while, it was found that Windows 8 was using a lot less CPU and Memory compared to Windows 7 ( 5% vs 1% and 404 MB vs 281 MB).

One of their goals was to make sure that all machines that are capable of running Windows 7, would also be able to run Windows 8 without a problem. Microsoft managed to surpass these expectations by making Windows 8 even less resource intensive.

How did Microsoft make this possible you might ask? Windows 8 made use of a new feature known as memory combining. In a nutshell, Windows looks at system RAM use, finds duplicate code that could be running for a variety of reasons and removes these duplicates from the memory so that you only have one copy of the code running, thus freeing up memory. The number of background processes that Windows 8 uses has also been reduced by 13. This is quite a large amount and should make a big difference and increase performance.