Well well well look at this, I and many other tech sites posted this article about a company “XPNet” which claimed that its software had provided them with information that lead them to believe that Windows 7 machines were constantly maxing out their Ram and 86% of systems were using 90-95% of their available memory.
Well it turns out that the man who made those claims, ” Craig Barth ” doesn’t actually exist, and neither do his outrageous facts.
While I and many others were quick to set the facts straight, I was then backed up by you guys just to confirm that I wasn’t some chosen one who had never experienced these “false” claims made by Mr. “Craig Barth”
Over at ZDnet they smelt a fraud, and ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan decided to do a bit of investigating of his own. Was this just an elaborate scheme to get XPNet and Devil Mountain Software into the spotlight? It seems it was.
After digging into Craig Barth’s history and mysterious tendency to only report to ComputerWorld, they discovered that t was merely a fictitious name used by InfoWorld reporter Randall C. Kennedy to distance his software company, Devil Mountain Software, from his writing persona.
It seems that Kennedy realised the game was up, all the pressure and outrage expressed from various blogs and tech sites across the web must have got to him. He has since confessed to ComputerWorld contributor Greg Keizer, who was tricked into believing that Randall Kennedy was the fictitious Craig Barth for 2 years.
“It’s a pseudonym I created a decade ago while writing news copy for Windows NT Magazine. I resurrected it a few years back in an effort to separate my sometimes controversial editorial contributions to InfoWorld from the hard research content I was developing as part of Devil Mountain Software.
Unsurprisingly InfoWorld editor Eric Knorr has since given Randall the sack and posted a public apology to InfoWorld readers.
And as for those far fetched memory claims? Well Ars technica’s Peter Bright decided to have a look into the Devil Mountain Software and when using their software, it did appear that Windows 7 reported higher memory usage. But only because of a feature called SuperFetch technology,which has been around since Windows Vista and is also present in Linux. This precaches commonly used assets in surplus memory to access them more quickly when called upon. Although the memory is technically in use, SuperFetch allows it to be overwritten instantly when needed, making it no less useful than free memory in real-world use.
However Kennedy wasn’t ready to go down without a fight and fought back at Ars technica in a blog post ( which is no longer available ) claiming that Devil Mountain’s performance monitoring utilities do accurately reflect the amount of RAM available
Anyone with any real experience monitoring Windows performance in the real world – and no, playing with Task Manager or Resource Monitor in your mom’s basement doesn’t qualify – knows we’re right
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