My laptop is 7 years old...

I think it is because windows uses a swap/page file on the hdd/ssd and creates 'excess ram'. virtual memory

Android and iOS do not due this afaik. ram is all you get

Cod3rror said:

Ha! I actually thought that could be it, but I wasn't able to find any confirmation of this.

I also have an SSD (Bliss! never going to a HDD again) so the SWAP file activities might be less noticeable.

Click to expand...

Yep. SSDs are biggest upgrade in years, probably since dual core imo. I can't go back either

There's more wear and tear on the drive, but I'm doing the same thing with a 4gb ram 07 desktop

gotluck said:

I think it is because windows uses a swap/page file on the hdd/ssd and creates 'excess ram'. virtual memory

Android and iOS do not due this afaik. ram is all you get

Click to expand...

No swap in Android or iOS? Really? That seems nuts.

Cod3rror said:

A latest smartphone with a Snapdragon 801 has more CPU power, more RAM and more graphics processing power.

Click to expand...

Uhh not exactly. I'm not an expert on it but the chips have a different architecture or something compared to PC chips. Current mobile processors are only now on par with Core 2 Duo speeds apparently.

Instead of virtual memory, Android uses a more complex method of memory management where cached processes are killed off to clear up memory when necessary. As the kernel is built on Linux, I don't see why you couldn't create a swap partition for virtual memory. I'd assume battery life would take a significant hit (if you're doing something that would cause a lot of memory swapping), though -- most likely why it isn't the default memory management in Android.

Cod3rror said:

A latest smartphone with a Snapdragon 801 has more CPU power, more RAM and more graphics processing power.

So, how come you cannot have more than 5 tabs open in Chrome without one of them being kicked out if you open another tab, or app?

Is Android (and iOS) heavier than Windows?

Click to expand...

You can't directly compare X86 to ARM.

And a mobile OS has a different goal than a PC OS with some overlap.

There is a reason why there is a Windows Phone rather than porting a full Windows 8 to run mobile devices.

Android isn't a very good OS, so I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist for a minute.

If you look at iOS and WP, you'll notice that they have somewhere around half a gigabyte to a gigabyte of ram. That's about 1/4 of what you have in your laptop. The CPU is an ARM, which is significantly less powerful than the Intel/x86-64 CPU in your laptop. But due to system OS design, you can easily flip between multiple browser tabs while playing music and texting.

Long story short, most cellphones are designed to run with much lower requirements than your 7 year old laptop, and due to how the OS is set up (so you can only have so many tabs in memory, etc) it can do so without slowing down or even lagging.

**Android not included.

A 2 ghz dual core mobile phone chip will be significantly slower (in general) to a desktop 2 ghz dual core cpu. Just look at AMD and intel, a 3ghz quad core intel destorys a 3 ghz quad core AMD.

Cod3rror said:

I wouldn't say the CPU is significantly less powerful.

T7300 - 2708
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/245201

iPhone 5s - 2623
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/514228

GPU difference is big... 29 GFLOPS for the laptop, 78 for 5s.

My laptop stutters if a 1080p video quality is played on YouTube, iPhone 5s handles it fine.

Click to expand...

That's raw computational abilities in an artificial benchmark. In real world tests and uses, a mid range 7 year old x86 is much faster than an ARM device. Try to do something like transcode a DVD's VOB file to h264 using the CPU only. The x86 machine will finish in an hour or two. The ARM device will take about 8 hours. Even the GPU isn't directly comparable. If the 5S' GPU had to drive a screen of similar size as a modern computer display, it would perform very poorly for most tasks. It simply doesn't have the proper video memory for it. While the GPU may have much more compute power, it lacks many newer GPU instructions that the Nvidia 8400 supports. The 5S, like most mobile devices, has an hardware decoder in it that allows it to decode video files without using more than a few CPU cycles. PC computers didn't get this feature until about 2010 or 2011 depending on the manufacturer.

Cod3rror said:

It has the following specs:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS
RAM: 2GB

I can have 30 background processes running and still have Firefox opened with 30 tabs (some of them with a video playing) without any of them constantly refreshing and being kicked out of the RAM.

Music player open (Foobar)

Email client open (Thunderbird)

Image viewer open (ACDSee)

And even a movie being played on a player (KMPlayer)

And with everything above running, nothing lags or gets kicked out of RAM and needs refreshing.



A latest smartphone with a Snapdragon 801 has more CPU power, more RAM and more graphics processing power.

So, how come you cannot have more than 5 tabs open in Chrome without one of them being kicked out if you open another tab, or app?

Is Android (and iOS) heavier than Windows?

Click to expand...

Agree. Cannot understand how we are almost forced to upgrade phones every 2 or 3 years whereas I keep my same laptop since 2006.

RAM usage on phones is ridiculous.

My laptop is 6 years old and I still use it everyday!

Sensamic said:

Agree. Cannot understand how we are almost forced to upgrade phones every 2 or 3 years whereas I keep my same laptop since 2006.

RAM usage on phones is ridiculous.

Click to expand...

So you ignored everything people posted above?

You cannot compare x86 to ARM. You just can't.

My Windows 7 desktop (for work) is now almost 5 years old and has only JUST started to lag a little bit - but that's usually down to Chrome/Firefox.

Otherwise it's absolutely rock solid. Windows 7 was a great OS. I don't know why Microsoft meddled around with it so much.

In the same timeframe I've been through 8 trillion phones.

sviato said:

Uhh not exactly. I'm not an expert on it but the chips have a different architecture or something compared to PC chips. Current mobile processors are only now on par with Core 2 Duo speeds apparently.

Click to expand...

Duh, don't you know gigahertz is all that matters?

he isnt even talking about the speed of the processor

the complaint is how ram functions on mobile. there is no fallback like on PC, so shortages are much more apparent to the user... like tab refresh syndrome (that does not happen on pc)

this isnt even an x86 vs arm discussion, don't know why people keep harping on that...

its not like virtual memory isnt possible on ARM (there have been hacks for both ios and android that enable some form of it), it just isn't ideal, or they cant figure it out yet

Cod3rror said:

It has the following specs:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS
RAM: 2GB

I can have 30 background processes running and still have Firefox opened with 30 tabs (some of them with a video playing) without any of them constantly refreshing and being kicked out of the RAM.

Music player open (Foobar)

Email client open (Thunderbird)

Image viewer open (ACDSee)

And even a movie being played on a player (KMPlayer)

And with everything above running, nothing lags or gets kicked out of RAM and needs refreshing.



A latest smartphone with a Snapdragon 801 has more CPU power, more RAM and more graphics processing power.

So, how come you cannot have more than 5 tabs open in Chrome without one of them being kicked out if you open another tab, or app?

Is Android (and iOS) heavier than Windows?

Click to expand...

SSD is faster than what is in the phone. The RAM is also likely faster in the laptop, since phones use low frequency RAM to maximize battery life. The graphics is probably better on your laptop.

I just refurbished a 6/7 year old Dell laptop with Core 2 Duo as well. It pretty much wouldn't run. Slapped an SSD and a fresh install of Win7 and Linux, and it runs very well. My main desktop is on it's 7th year now, and runs very well thanks to SSD, even in Adobe suites or music creation (FL Studio), and games (due to graphics card). Mind you, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 is still being highly praised on newegg, over half a decade after it left the market.

What's more curious is that my iPad 1 with only 256MB of RAM could hold as many or more pages than an iPad Air on iOS 7 with four times the RAM.

I know it has to push more pixels (not sure that really applies to RAM) and the OS is more involved... But you would still expect it to hold more web pages in its memory. What's a web page these days anyways, a few MB?

I think the issue is more with iOS 7 than with actual RAM. Either it eats way too much with just the OS, or it handles it poorly, or it refreshes tabs for no real reason.

Maybe it's Apples way of getting their "look at how much more web traffic iOS users have!!"...

Cod3rror said:

It has the following specs:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS
RAM: 2GB

I can have 30 background processes running and still have Firefox opened with 30 tabs (some of them with a video playing) without any of them constantly refreshing and being kicked out of the RAM.

Music player open (Foobar)

Email client open (Thunderbird)

Image viewer open (ACDSee)

And even a movie being played on a player (KMPlayer)

And with everything above running, nothing lags or gets kicked out of RAM and needs refreshing.



A latest smartphone with a Snapdragon 801 has more CPU power, more RAM and more graphics processing power.

So, how come you cannot have more than 5 tabs open in Chrome without one of them being kicked out if you open another tab, or app?

Is Android (and iOS) heavier than Windows?

Click to expand...

Apples and oragnes...

Does your laptop have a 3G/4G antenna and built in telephone?
Does your laptop have 6 hours battery life?
Does your laptop fit in your pocket?