RAM requirements on Vista, 2GB is really the realistic minimum

[mellowfellow]

ram for vista

i installed windows vista ultimate and ran into all sorts of problems.

now i have upgraded to 1 gig ram and bought an ati sapphire radeonx1550 (512mb) £56 which is supposedly especially designed for vista .

i can now run loads of diff programs at same time including bittorrent with no probs whatsoever and i now have a pc performance rating of 4.5
so 1gig is sufficient but you deffo need at least a 512mb graphics card also .

 

[Deanzo]

but you deffo need at least a 512mb graphics card also .

Not so my friend, you see not all cards are created equal, I have vista on both of my home pc's, the one in my sig 256mb and even the 7900pro 128mb is more than enough.

And if your still not convinced google 8800gts 320mb

 

[MRD]

People nowadays worry too much about the amount of RAM on the card and not nearly enough about the GPU. The GPU is generally a lot more important, unless the amount of RAM is stupidly low.

 

[voyagerxp]

I also think 2 gig of ram is a must as i only have 1 gig of ram and soon as i go into windows desktop my usage is at at least 70% and if i use nero it goes to 85+%. Waiting for my extra 2 gig to arrive.

 

[mellowfellow]

ok fair enuff deanzo , but my pc used to freeze before i got 512mb graphics card but then again my processor was not as fast as yours , also the microsoft helpline for vista reccommends a 512mb card especially for vista ultimate .

 

[Lancelot]

Dual-core CPU, 2GB ram, and 128MB Hardware-DX9 video. I have all that in my laptop

 

[mongoose470]

At the Microsoft technology conventions on their ready to rock tour, they are now saying 1GB is the MINIMUM. 512MB is a nightmare on Vista and is no longer considered Vista capable, although the manufacturers are suckering people into 512MB systems.

Even with 1GB I see a lot of disk thrashing (I have 512MB on my video card.) 2GB is optimum.

Besides, as Vista requires more memory, so will the new applications coming out for it. DDR2 is cheap now.

 

[MRD]

Anyone who markets a 512mb system as Vista capable should be sued.

 

[deathman20]

1Gig will do fine as long as its nothing intensive. Disk access is all done by the indexing service and the system restore feature which seems to do quiet a bit in the background.

 

[johnz]

I started my Vista install with 2gb, and everything was silky smooth. I then had a stick go bad, and loading times went up, and things were a little laggy in execution. 1gb is enough for low impact users, but if you game, or use any kind of memory intensive tasks 2gb is what you need.

I've had my bad stick of ram replaced now, and added 2 more gb of ram(4gb total, 3.07 as seen by Vista32) and I think it feels even better. Not scientific at all, but I think my machine got a little snappier.

If your going to keep your current machine for awhile (eg. staying with DDR2) then I'd recommend 4gb of ram. It super cheap now, so you can stock up, and you'll be ready for 64bit when it makes sense to switch.

 

[chaseendicott]

512 is the advertised minimum, but I would say 1 gig realistically.

For recommended I would suggest 2 gigs.

 

[terran2k]

I am running 2GB of memory on vista, right now I have 20MB free out of 2GB, with 1.4GB cache, real nice.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

1g is realistic, and i know as i have been using Vista on my macbook 2ghz /1g of ram and integrated graphics and it runs fine, using 4-5 programs at once, browsers, email, word, outlook, msn, trillian, AVG, F@H.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

Acer sells a desktop with only 512 MB of ram and it has vista home on it. My friend bought it and paid $400 for it. She should have asked me about it first, because for that price she could have gotten a much better computer. 512MB and Vista and integrated shared video. Did I mention she is into photography and some video editing? I'm not sure if she could have bought a worse machine for her needs.

So what are the other specs and for $400, no, you cant buy much more then that, besides, you can get 1g of DDR2 ram for like $40 right now anyways.

 

[oakstave]

disable superfetch if u have little RAM
programs will take a bit longer to load but ull use less RAM
but really u dont need to disable it.. windows will automatically give back the RAM when needed

Agreed. The superfetch is a resource hog in the beginning, then a boon after it's indexed all the drives. My Vista machine runs 512-600 megs of RAM at idle. With the price of memory now, I can't imagine going less than 2 gigs unless you are just doing office work.

 

[Oc1Kenube]

1gb runs just fine in all applications and gaming although i am now running 2gb because ram is dirt cheap atm.

 

[LeAd_Poisoning]

the system requirements seem basic enough for none of you to worry about. With Service Packs and various third party registry and other additions, Vista should run as fine as XP

 

[Trap05]

I'm not building anything with Vista on it with less than 1GB and I am recommending 2GB as a cheap upgrade. Even most XP systems being sold these days have 1GB as a minimum.