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David Overton's Blog » I hate seeing computers advertised on TV with 512MB of RAM with Vista
I hate seeing computers advertised on TV with 512MB of RAM with Vista

This is a personal rant!!  I was watching TV and saw a device advertised at a very attractive price, but with only 512MB of RAM.  While Vista will work on a machine with 512MB of RAM the RECOMMENDED MINIMUM for all versions other than Home Basic is 1GB, meaning that the systems are shipping with just half the recommended minimum they should ship with.  The recommended minimum amount of RAM for Windows XP was 128MB RAM with 64MB being the absolute minimum. Shipping a home premium or business machine with below the recommended minimum is a bit like running Windows XP with 64 (or even 128MB RAM).  Think what XP would be like and while Vista is not that bad with 512MB, it is definitely not great.

So, please, please, please, 1GB minimum, 2GB and above for power users.  I've seen this discussed in so many places, but please, 512MB is just no fun - don't let it happen to your customers - prepare them now.  I just bought 2GB of RAM for about £30 per stick so when buying new PCs, be a good person and put it in there!!

Why, you might ask, does Vista require more memory than Windows XP, well it is all the new things.. such as:

  • Indexing and Search
  • Aero Graphics (open up a PC running Vista with Aero and look at the memory use of DWM - you get the idea)
  • Security Options
  • New Services space to move (VSS)
  • Virtualisation of files and registry
  • Windows Defender
  • SuperFetch

I am sure there is more too - this is my opinion, but I had to get the rant out of the system.

 

ttfn

David

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Posted Wed, May 23 2007 5:38 PM by David Overton
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Comments

Tim Long wrote re: I hate seeing computers advertised on TV with 512MB of RAM with Vista
on Thu, May 24 2007 2:02 AM

You are so right! I sometimes wonder what planet OEMs are on. PC world has loads of Vista systems with just 512Mb. I am supplying computers with 1Gb as a baseline for an "Office Ready PC" but I was disappointed to discover that my supplier is using motherboards with only 2 DIMM slots and is putting 512Mb in each slot, leaving no room for upgrade.

Andy Parkes wrote re: I hate seeing computers advertised on TV with 512MB of RAM with Vista
on Thu, May 24 2007 9:36 AM

I've with you on this. It's one of my pet peeves too.

Thing is it's been going on forever.

Before Vista we saw too many XP machines with 256Mb of RAM. While this runs the OS ok by the time you have loaded anti-virus/anti-spyware (plus what ever rubbish comes pre-loaded!) and the user has Outlook, IE, maybe a word document or a Spreadsheet and a LOB application that 256mb starts to get a little stretched.

Now that i'm able to make the company policy we dont sell any pc to a customer that has less than 512MB for XP (1Gb where preferable) and 1Gb minimum for Vista

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