Vista Hotfix for PC Games

[vinyard]

Microsoft has released a hotfix which addresses memory management for vista x86 and x64. Currently it's available by request only and can be requested by using this online form. It's supposed to fix issues such as the BF2 and 2142 memory crashes. I will be testing these out today.

An article on Anand Tech says the patch does fix these issues.

Microsoft has published knowledge base article 940105 on the matter, and with it has finalized a patch to reduce the high virtual address space usage of games under Vista. From this and our own developer sources, we can piece together the problem that was causing the high virtual address space issues under Vista.

As you can see the memory usage in games has dropped down a lot fixing the unexpected game crashes. The hotfix has no effect on performance.

With performance numbers literally the same with and without the hotfix, we can safely say that there is not a performance penalty for using this hotfix.

You can get the hotfix by online request @ Microsoft.

VNet is also hosting this hotfix:
Download: KB940105 [32-bit only]

View: Full Article @ Anand Tech

[zero86ea]

sweet shit vinyard...well my pc keeps crashing and goes to blue screen. something about the memory, you think this will fix it? it keeps happening more constantly now ! i hate vista

[vinyard]

Yeah possibly. This lowers the amount of virtual memory applications use. Usually, at least I think, it doesn't cause the BSOD but this patch can possibly fix the problem. Try it out.

[zero86ea]

so far, no restart yet! before it would restart like once a day...and it hasnt so far. oh and one more thing, BSOD?!?!?! wtf is that?

[vinyard]

Thats cool that it hasn't restarted. Hopefully it fixed your problems.

BSOD -> Blue Screen Of Death.

[Rascuacho]

ok