memory+vista=HOW MUCH???

[lewbaseball07]

do u really need freaking 4gb to run vista ultimate. LOOK AT MY SIG. i have 2gb and it freaking boots up in no more than 20 seconds. SERIOUSLY. whats the point of 4gb like everyone saying you need!?!?!

 

[Mondoman]

No.

 

[weilin]

i dont think its the boot up enthusiasts are concerned about. Look at your windows setup right now, in task manager check the ram usage and page file usage. you may find that approx 500mb or so of your ram is for the OS alone (RC1 info, havent tried RTM yet). which leaves you with 1.5gb. Games like Call of Duty 2 requires like 1.5gb now for max settings. That means, newer games will required more. Besides, some people refuse to use pagefile becuase hard-drives are slow. For them, 4gb may be an "requirement" or, more accurately, a personal preference. Then there's video editors, programmers etc...

Edit: spelling

 

[capnbfg]

I ran Vista RC1 for about a week with the system configuration listed in my sig, and I thought it ran pretty much flawlessly. 4GB wouldn't hurt, but I have not seen any reason why it would be necessary.

 

[nilepez]

PCworld actually tested that out, and found out for 32bit, anything above 1gig is overkill (only a few percent increase in performance) and for 64bit, 2gig was sufficient to make it run as fast as 32bit. Turns out vista isn't as much as a power hog as expected, you actually don't even need a dx10 card to run aero, they got even fairly current integrated graphics and a 9800pro to run aero smoothly and showed how turning it off didn't make things run faster. So it looks like Microsoft actually isn't as much of a dick I though and made the power requirements a lot more achievable with older systems (though I bet that ati and nvidia are still loving vista )

Since this is in the February edition, its no online yet so I show you the article, but I thought it was quite interesting

I don't know how it'd run with 1GB, but I find that XP is better with 2GB than 1GB. Regardless, buying 4gb probably doesn't make much sense, unless you're running Vista64. AFAIK, just like XP32, it cannot address all of the ram. I've done a little bit in Vista with 2GB, and it runs fine.

As for Aero, I suspect people will turn it off more because they don't want it than because of performance. Kinda like I turn off all the eye candy in XP even though it doesn't really affect performance (I just hate the animated window disapearing.....GO AWAY ALREADY )

That said, I'm not sure I'd turn of Aero. I'd probably keep the new start menu. OTOH, if I could revert to the current version of Explorer, I probably would (haven't investigated if that's an option).

 

[Zorg]

do u really need freaking 4gb to run vista ultimate. LOOK AT MY SIG. i have 2gb and it freaking boots up in no more than 20 seconds. SERIOUSLY. whats the point of 4gb like everyone saying you need!?!?!

I installed Vista with a Northwood 2.4c and 512MB of value ram and a Matrox (God help me ) g400 video card. Vista ran fine but no joy on Aeroglass. In the task manager there is an area that gives hard faults (I thought page file access due to not enough ram). So I went balls to the wall and got the state of the art x850 pro (being dumped for $150.00 on Newegg). I modded it to x850 xt pe, and got 2 GB of ram in dual channel. (hot sh!t aye). I got my Aeroglass, it was cool but no more than that. The page faults were considerably less but still occurred at a higher than expected rate. I looked closely, and I wasn’t even close to using up my ram. So the hard faults appeared to be occurring even though there was no reasonable expectation that the data would be in ram, as in opening a new program etc. This makes perfect sense because the OS doesn't know what should be in ram. Also, as with XP, Vista will cache anything that it thinks you might want to use but it will keep the ram available. So, I say 2 GB of ram is fine. If you want to play a game it might need more. If you want to play a game then load the game and try it before you dump money, needlessly, on additional ram.

 

[nilepez]

I don't know about that, I didn't see a performance increase at all from 1gig to 2gig in xp home

Then you don't play games or use photo editing software.

 

[sailer]

As to the 4 gig question, my guess is that initially, 2 gig will do fine, but after the real DX10 games get out in the world, 4 gig may be necessary to run them smoothly. That may take a year or more, so I don't see any need to rush out and buy 4 gig now.

 

[lychee_lch]

Winxp pro limit is at 2GB for it system to truely utilize. More then that will be reserved. As for window vista, especially the 64bit version will goes around 16GB and more. what Tacos say is true because currently not much software and driver will support windows vista 64bit especially the RC1 and RC2 version. So the true performance of windows vista have not yet truely exposed. As for now, 2GB for windows vista MAYBE enough, but who know what will happen in the future.

 

[lychee_lch]

If more RAM in windows vista is a waste, then what's the point that they invented Ready Boost feature ??? This feture will GROW more mature in the future. What the PC WORLD mention was Feb issue back ... but who's know .... ?


The windows Vista true potential are not really explore yet. And it was too early to put any judgement on it. However, as the time goes on, MORE MEMORY always bring more benefit to user IF user got a "BANG BANG" in his wallet.

 

[Santino]

like every one above has said, 2gbs looks like the sweet spot for now, tired runing games vista rc1 and memory usage was way more than a 1gb, but 2gbs looks to be good enough, but hey even some games on windows xp take advantage of 2gbs, FEAR, and Company of heros, would benifit from a 2gb upgrade on my system

 

[chuckshissle]

So anyone using the Vista for gaming? Which one should be good enough to gaming. I can't spend $400 for an OS so I'm thinking the home basic or home premium would be good enough for pc gaming?

 

[nilepez]

So anyone using the Vista for gaming? Which one should be good enough to gaming. I can't spend $400 for an OS so I'm thinking the home basic or home premium would be good enough for pc gaming?

It's not $400.00 for any version, unless this is your first version of Windows. Im not sure what the upgrades will cost, but my guess is 250 for ultimate, 200 for Business, 140 for Home Premium and 90-100 for Home Basic.

IMO, Home basic is a waste, since the vast majority of interface tweeks are omitted from that version. OTOH, if you can get a $40.00 copy of XP Home from Office Depot (probalby sold out everywhere) then you get a free upgrade to Vista home basic....form there you can do the upgrade to Home Premium if you need it.

The truth is, there's virtually no compelling reason to upgrade in the first 12 months. DX10 be damned, the true power of it won't be known for at least a year. I'll get a free copy of the Business version, but I doubt I'll find anything I need that I don't already have...but it's free, so I'll probably run it

 

[nilepez]

get home premium, basic has no features at all, but the premium on pro and ultimate is not worth it right now (wait 'til oems arrive at cheap prices).

For gaming, I think that you should get 2gig ram, but hold off until later when you can get dx10 graphics cards and more ram once it's actually affectively improving gaming performance

Depends. Almost anyone can get a student version of MS OSs for home use (office's name has actually changed to Office 2007 for Home and Students) and upgrade editions aren't much more than OEM versions. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that MS will be very strict on OEM copies of the OS. Thus if you change hardware, you may have to buy another copy of Vista. Unless the price is half of an upgrade version, I'd get that over an OEM.

 

[lav]

You don't need 4GB ram to run vista. I've seen the final version of Vista running very smoothly in 1GB ram with ATI X700 and Aero interface. It was the 32 bit version. You don't need to change anything in your rig, it's pretty future proof. Vista ultimate will fly on your computer, even the 64 bit version, which I recommend. If you don't use your computer professionally, there are no apps around that use up to 2GB ram, let alone 4GB. Photoshop and some games are exceptions. The cool thing is all the rigs accept 4 memory slots, so you can allways put 2 more sticks if in the future Phototshop chokes on you on Vista. Cpu's can be changed, quad cores can replace the dual cores if you do movie encoding or whatever. The curent intel machines with 2GB are very future proof, upgradable and ideally suited for Vista.

Having said that, all the new machines should be ordered/configured with 2x1GB sticks, 1GB is a costly mistake in my opinion. 64 bit versions of Vista prefer 2GB versus 1GB.

Lav