Aero and 1 gig

[comphulk]

On my laptop, I have 1 gig of Ram installed, and it works quite well for me, even with Aero on. I do some gaming, and quite often browse the internet, but my computer is still running good.

However, if you can get 2 gigs, I recommend it. I am thinking of getting 2 gigs of Ram myself.

 

[ltwally]

On my workstation, with 8gigs of memory Vista still keeps 1-1.5gigs of the swapfile in use.

Swapfile allocation, by itself, is not an indication of how much RAM is enough. I have no idea what exactly Vista is putting in the paging file... but everyone needs to remember that Vista has a radically different approach to resource consumption that previous versions of Windows.

As to the parent's question: I honestly don't feel that 1gig of RAM is enough for any real use of Vista. With that little memory, you're going to be actively using your swapfile. Even if the system is only used for little-old-lady web surfing and emailing her grandkids, I recommend a bare-minimum of 1.5gig. 2gigs seems to be the sweet-spot for multitasking and the like.

 

[comphulk]

It depends on what you want to do on your computer. If you're just the average home user, than it should work out fine.
Anything beyond that, like photo management, extreme gaming or animation should run at least on 2 gigs, 4 is better and 8 is the best.

 

[comphulk]

2 gigs is best.

 

[Night]

Basically the way windows vista allocates memory is by sharing a decent sum of your physical ram w/ your video card... i have a GeForce 8600 GT 256mb ddr3, it shows in properties as 1gb, 256vram / 768 shared... Basically, it learns to use what you give it... you might be susceptible to occasional slow downs where it might take a milisecond for the window to drag or something like that...but it should work. However, don't bother using Dreamscene until you can get more memory, it'll eat up your ram like you won't believe...

i currently have 2gb pc2-5300, typically i have about 40%-50% physical memory in use by windows and misc. background apps... i've only seen it go as high as maybe 70%... get another gig and you should be pleasently surprised... it's all about finding the bottleneck, and w/ vista, you want to eliminate them for the best experience possible.

 

[f_vo]

nice to see some guys can actually USE "dreamscene". I installed it succesfully some 5 times and that is it. It does not show in the installed programs. Furthermore Vista keeps telling me there is one upgrade available. I gave up on dreamscene.

François

 

[comphulk]

What is 'DreamScene"?

 

[mikerrr]

I agree w/crito the restore points kill your storage, ax all the shortcuts
and run disk cleanup. also check firewalls and or security applications.
--
Thanks / Mikerrr


"Crito" wrote:

>
> I'm running Aero at this very moment with 512 megs and have 160 megs
> free. I'm using an ancient MX440 with 64megs and the setup program even
> turned on all the bells and whistles by default. So I don't think that's
> what's hogging memory and making your systems slower.
>
> Turning off restore points, background defrag and indexing on drive C:
> seemed to make this PC about twice as fast though. :|
>
>
> --
> Crito
>

 

[bistro]

nice to see some guys can actually USE "dreamscene". I installed it succesfully some 5 times and that is it. It does not show in the installed programs. Furthermore Vista keeps telling me there is one upgrade available. I gave up on dreamscene.

François

I assume you using Ultimate if you installed it "successfully"? That's the only version that Dreamscene will work in. Also, Dreamscene does NOT show up in the Programs menu. It shows up under Display Properties (right-click on the Desktop) where you choose what Dreamscene to show, much like wallpaper.
Almost all Dreamscenes that are available from Stardock (you have to install Deskscapes first for them to work) are user made and therefore vary as far as resource usage. Site here. I've noticed some are quite conservative, while others hog both the RAM and CPU. Even with 4GB of RAM, I've had some crash on me. Don't look to Microsoft for much support with Dreamscenes...they've pretty much left all that to Stardock.

 

[ltwally]

Basically the way windows vista allocates memory is by sharing a decent sum of your physical ram w/ your video card... i have a GeForce 8600 GT 256mb ddr3, it shows in properties as 1gb, 256vram / 768 shared...

Huh? No. No. This has nothing to do with Vista, and everything to do with both your BIOS allocation for shared memory and your video drivers.

This is not, I repeat NOT, something that the Vista operating system is doing.

The reason that Vista performs better with more physical memory is a combination of lots of bloat and a VM that is geared towards more RAM. This has been the trend of every operating system since the dawn of operating systems - though Microsoft is well known for being particularly guilty of this. Let's not forget OSX, in all fairness, too.

 

[AvatarOfTheShip]

I've got 4gig too and my little eye tells me Vista is using just under half of that and apart from writing this my machine is doing Jack

 

[ltwally]

I've got 4gig too and my little eye tells me Vista is using just under half of that and apart from writing this my machine is doing Jack

I currently have 8gig, and there is little point to going over 4gigs unless you do lots of video editing or similar.

When I first installed Vista, I had 4gig, and the ReadyCache was constantly running it down to 0megs free. And that was fine - but I figured, hey, if ReadyCache will use that much RAM, it should be able to cache even more if I add more RAM. Not really so. ReadyCache typically hovers at around 4gigs, leaving a lot of RAM free.