2gb Ram - Enough for win7 ?

[itafak]

Trying to build a poverty pc from some spare parts lying around and some cheap stuff from ebay.
specs would be:
2gb ddr3 1333 ram
celeron g530
5850 videocard
160gb hdd

Looking for the best performance what I could possibly get from this poverty pc, should I go with windows xp or win7?
Obviously win7 is much nicer, but I got only 2gb ram and there are no extra slots on motherboard to put more,nor do i want to buy a new set of 4gb.

should windows xp be much more snappier with such low specs since it can run even on 128mb of ram?

 

[Compman55]

2GB is fine. Install windows 7 and goto a classic style visual theme. Solid color desktop, with an old skool start menu.

The next trick is to NEVER leave any flash based tabs open in your browsers. These are a huge memory hog.

 

[itafak]

2GB is fine. Install windows 7 and goto a classic style visual theme. Solid color desktop, with an old skool start menu.

The next trick is to NEVER leave any flash based tabs open in your browsers. These are a huge memory hog.

classic style gives maybe 5% improvement but an ugly desktop...so no thanks.
Kinda sux that windows 7 alone uses like 900mb of ram.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Looking for the best performance what I could possibly get from this poverty pc, should I go with windows xp or win7?
Obviously win7 is much nicer, but I got only 2gb ram and there are no extra slots on motherboard to put more,nor do i want to buy a new set of 4gb.

should windows xp be much more snappier with such low specs since it can run even on 128mb of ram?

You don't want to run XP on it for 3 reasons:

1) XP support STOPS in 22 days.
2) No DX10/11 in XP. Windows 7 also takes advantage of Direct2D UI acceleration.
3) 7 simply runs better on low spec hardware then XP.

Oh, and believe me you do not want to run XP with any service pack on only 128MB RAM...

classic style gives maybe 5% improvement but an ugly desktop...so no thanks.
Kinda sux that windows 7 alone uses like 900mb of ram.

2GB is fine. Install windows 7 and goto a classic style visual theme. Solid color desktop, with an old skool start menu.

The next trick is to NEVER leave any flash based tabs open in your browsers. These are a huge memory hog.

2GB is acceptable if you don't have too many things/tasks open at once. If you want to shave a bit off RAM use, you could install the 32bit version of 7. Its more lean on memory then the x64 version. Should save you ~300MB RAM.

 

[sm625]

Dont install 7 on a HDD. Use XP. XP runs much better than 7 on a HDD. 7 will have you tearing your hair out. You dont really gain anything anyway. DX10 is irrelevant to a budget machine. And official support for XP doesnt amount to a hill of beans.

 

[pyjujiop]

DX10 doesn't matter on a machine like this, but not having patches for security flaws in XP does matter. There's no way I would run XP on any machine after the end of support unless it was entirely off any network. To be perfectly honest, I'd run Linux on a machine with those specs, because XP is about to become open season for hackers and it's not enough hardware to run Vista, 7, or 8 well. But that might not be an option for whatever the OP has planned.

 

[Eug]

2 GB is OK for a "poverty PC" running Win 7, but 4 GB is the sweet spot for the low end IMO, assuming the machine can handle it. If not, then 3 GB.

I have 3 Win 7 machine in this house, with two of them being slow ones. One backup laptop and one guest machine. I started with 2 GB in both, and eventually went up to 3-4 GB for them.

Don't waste your time with XP at this point.

 

[GlacierFreeze]

2GB RAM? Win 7 will run fine.

XP updates stop in April. Installing XP should not even be considered an option at this point.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Dont install 7 on a HDD. Use XP. XP runs much better than 7 on a HDD. 7 will have you tearing your hair out. You dont really gain anything anyway.

Now that is simply not true...

DX10 is irrelevant to a budget machine. And official support for XP doesnt amount to a hill of beans.

DX10/11 is irrelevant. But WDDM support is relevant.

If you intend to connect that PC to the Internet, security support does matter. Presently I'd rather use a Linux distro then XP. Why anyone would voluntarily install a 13(!) year old OS on a new system, when there is something better available (free of charge) is simply beyond me...

 

[itafak]

Now that is simply not true...



DX10/11 is irrelevant. But WDDM support is relevant.

If you intend to connect that PC to the Internet, security support does matter. Presently I'd rather use a Linux distro then XP. Why anyone would voluntarily install a 13(!) year old OS on a new system, when there is something better available (free of charge) is simply beyond me...

torrents are also free of charge
Also lol at you guys saying not to use XP just because their support will expire in less then 30days! have been using xp which hasnt been updated for last 4years and it's fine! In fact I disable those stupid updates on all my PC's whatever OS it's running.

Sheeps gonna sheep

 

[mikeymikec]

Win7 runs fine on a HDD. 2GB is adequate currently IMO for the basic uses, esp. for 32-bit but adequate for 64-bit. However, for other people with integrated graphics systems were say 256MB is lost to onboard graphics, it's iffy. Windows Update for example uses a lot of RAM at peak times.

 

[dorion]

Sheeps gonna sheep

Do you really think you should say that while dissing Linux?

Anyways...
I used a Windows 7/8 machine on a pentium 4 with 2GB of ram for a few months at work. Do not do it. I spent massive amounts of time tinkering with the sucker so that it could survive a light workload, but as soon as I tried anything outside of some chrome tabs and putty I'd end up chugging.

If you are going the Windows 7 route, check up on services to disable, grab a 4 or 8 GB flash drive for Readyboost, and prepare to have some frustrating wait times.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

have been using xp which hasnt been updated for last 4years and it's fine! In fact I disable those stupid updates on all my PC's whatever OS it's running.

Let me put it another way then. I remember a test done around 2005. A fully patched XP machine with SP2 was connected directly to the Internet. It was infected with various malware 2 minutes later. It very likely hasn't improved much since...
Well each to his own I guess...

Win7 runs fine on a HDD. 2GB is adequate currently IMO for the basic uses, esp. for 32-bit but adequate for 64-bit. However, for other people with integrated graphics systems were say 256MB is lost to onboard graphics, it's iffy. Windows Update for example uses a lot of RAM at peak times.

If you don't use aero and a high resolution, you can get away with only 64MB video RAM for basic desktop use. Anyway, anything since the GMA 900 has DVMT, so it only uses what it needs for video RAM.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Anyways...
I used a Windows 7/8 machine on a pentium 4 with 2GB of ram for a few months at work. Do not do it. I spent massive amounts of time tinkering with the sucker so that it could survive a light workload, but as soon as I tried anything outside of some chrome tabs and putty I'd end up chugging.

What particular model P4 might that be? I'm kind of curious because I have seen plenty of 5xx and 6xx's chugging happily along with "only" 2GB RAM. Another thing to consider is which model HDD is in the system, some older models just have horrible performance.

 

[mikeymikec]

In fact I disable those stupid updates on all my PC's whatever OS it's running.

Please learn what those "stupid updates" do before deciding to switch them off, and even worse, advocating that others should do the same.

 

[mikeymikec]

If you don't use aero and a high resolution, you can get away with only 64MB video RAM for basic desktop use. Anyway, anything since the GMA 900 has DVMT, so it only uses what it needs for video RAM.

A lot of OEM systems don't allow you to alter the amount of allocated video memory though.

According to Process Explorer, switching off desktop composition on my system (1080p) uses about 7MB video RAM, compared to ~100MB with Aero on.

 

[nwo]

What particular model P4 might that be? I'm kind of curious because I have seen plenty of 5xx and 6xx's chugging happily along with "only" 2GB RAM. Another thing to consider is which model HDD is in the system, some older models just have horrible performance.

Yep, the HDD is definitely a thing to consider since some older HDDs have atrocious read/writes even though they are "7200RPM" The difference between one of the new 7200 RPM HDDs and one that's 5 years old is astronomical let alone one from the P4 days which was probably unable to sustain more than a few MB/s random read/write.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Depending on the vintage (any HDD built in the last 5 years), a HDD is fine for Win7. 2GB is also fine, even for 64-bit Windows 7. You will, however, have to limit your tabbed browsing a bit. 10-12 tabs should be fine. More may be trouble.

You could consider installing a 4GB USB flash drive for ReadyBoost, this was already mentioned, but worth mentioning again. For low-RAM machines, I've heard it can really help.

 

[ashetos]

I also don't recommend installing the 64-bit version of Windows 7. My suggestion is Windows 7 32-bit, which works just fine with 2GB of ram with aero and GPU hardware acceleration enabled on various old-ish netbooks with atom processors I have tested.

I also recommend enabling AHCI for SATA, it's faster than IDE compatibility mode for most drives. Windows XP is unsafe and generally slower on relatively modern hardware, except from the memory utilization part.

If you really want your system to shine, you should install Windows 8.1 32-bit. This should fly.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Windows 7 or 8.1 32bit, since it sounds like upgrading RAM is out of the question

XP just too archaic and the rest of the system is too modern and would go to waste on XP

if you find the HDD too slow and the amount of RAM to constraining, there's always ReadyBoost you can try if you have any modern flash drives/sticks available (~4+GB size within last 5 years or so)

if the HDD isn't completely ancient (ie at least SATA) enabling AHCI should help, as well as short stroking by limiting the size of the partition if you don't plan on filling the drive up.

 

[ashetos]

torrents are also free of charge
Also lol at you guys saying not to use XP just because their support will expire in less then 30days! have been using xp which hasnt been updated for last 4years and it's fine! In fact I disable those stupid updates on all my PC's whatever OS it's running.

Sheeps gonna sheep

Also, there are so many things wrong in your post, better listen to the people in the forums here, most of them know more stuff than you and you can learn a lot.

First, end of support means that your PC will not only be a glad member of various botnets due to lack of security updates but all of your favourite software will cease to support XP sooner than later.

Secondly, if you were a computer programmer you would be terrified of the ocean of programming errors and bugs that can cause:
1. security holes (you don't care about that, until you use a credit card maybe, hmm)
2. memory leaks (free memory of your system continues to drop as time passes by, until it reaches 0, cheers!)
3. graphics errors (annoying corruption that might even require a hard reboot)
4. silent data corruption (remember that word document you wrote 6 months ago? double check it because both the original and your backup are now unreadable)
5. low performance (many updates fix so called performance bugs, oh, why is it so slow?)
6. compatibility errors
7. locale and other regional stuff
8. it's a never ending list really, don't skip the updates

Also, all those "free" torrents come with very nicely packaged trojans, so it's not really free now is it? Using pirated Windows also requires research, something other than a torrent comment saying "I scanned it and it has no viruses, thanx lolz die sheepz".

Do you realize how that "Sheeps gonna sheep" sounds now?

 

[dorion]

What particular model P4 might that be? I'm kind of curious because I have seen plenty of 5xx and 6xx's chugging happily along with "only" 2GB RAM. Another thing to consider is which model HDD is in the system, some older models just have horrible performance.

Intel Pentium D 925, my workload is a SSH session to the server and Browser tabs so there wasn't much performance needed, but occasionally I'd need to start up Visual Studio and SQL Management Studio or some other beefy GUI app. Windows 8 was much better performance wise but I found Linux to be better in performance and acceptable Windowing Environment.

 

[tidy]

.

 

[bononos]

If you haven't bought win7 yet, you might want to consider win8 because it takes even less memory then win7.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

A lot of OEM systems don't allow you to alter the amount of allocated video memory though.

According to Process Explorer, switching off desktop composition on my system (1080p) uses about 7MB video RAM, compared to ~100MB with Aero on.

Strictly speaking, displaying 1024x768 only requires a single MB of video RAM...

(doing the math for 1080p, would yield a requirement of 6.22MB. So ~7MB sounds right)

That might be pushing things too far though...

Intel Pentium D 925, my workload is a SSH session to the server and Browser tabs so there wasn't much performance needed, but occasionally I'd need to start up Visual Studio and SQL Management Studio or some other beefy GUI app. Windows 8 was much better performance wise but I found Linux to be better in performance and acceptable Windowing Environment.

I'd think Visual Studio is the culprit. Starting it uses both a lot of memory, and disk I/O.

If you don't use one already, I'd suggest using some form of external graphics card. The early Intel GMA's utilize the CPU for some GPU calculations. Throw that on top of a fully loaded CPU, and it sounds a lot like what you're describing. It doesn't have to be anything crazily expensive, even an ancient Geforce 6000-series would do. It just has to free the CPU from doing desktop composition.