How will Vista Home Basic run on a laptop with 512 MB Ram?

[FortFunFoSho]

All -

Need to get pretty much the cheapest laptop I can from CDW (for work reasons) and I can choose from either a HP with a Celeron or a Acer with a Sempron.

How will the OS run on these machines with that little ram? I am worried it will be brutal but unfortunately I am on somewhat of a cost limit.

 

[bsobel]

Personally I'd downgrade the proc to get 1gb on either a Vista or XP laptop if that is an option. Your right it will work, but I agree it will be brutal for all but the most basic of apps (I wouldn't put Office on that)...

 

[nerp]

It's OK, passable, but not that great. It will chug pretty hard for most everything. Throw another 512MB stick or better yet, a pair of 1GB sticks and Vista will fly.

I know from experience. I bought a Celeron M 440 laptop with 512mb ram and Vista basic on it. It stunk. Threw 2GB in there, upped to Home Premium and holy cow. It runs great. The intel gma945 handles Aero suprisingly well.

 

[secretanchitman]

no way. my gfs parents got a dell vostro 200 desktop, and i bumped up the cpu from a celeron D 1.6Ghz to a 1.8 or 2.0Ghz with 512MB and vista home basic. it is REALLY sluggish so i put them back to xp pro and all is well. seriously, with vista, you NEED at least 1GB of ram and an athlon64/pentium 4 2.4C of some sort to get decent performance.

 

[Peter]

512 megs of notebook RAM can be had for less than $20. Spend that to make it 1G total, and you'll be fine.

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: Peter
512 megs of notebook RAM can be had for less than $20. Spend that to make it 1G total, and you'll be fine.

Beware though, many (most, in fact) notebooks shipping w/512mb DDR2 have TWO 256mb modules and no open slots. Buying one 512mb in this situation will force you to remove one 256mb to place the new 512mb, giving you 768mb total.

Check what you have in your system before buying!

2GB (2x1GB DDR2) can be had for $70-80ish @ the egg.

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: Peter
512 megs of notebook RAM can be had for less than $20. Spend that to make it 1G total, and you'll be fine.

Many laptops come with only 2 slots and both filled.

 

[Noema]

I wouldn't run Vista with less than 1GB.

 

[magiceyes2]

Originally posted by: secretanchitman
no way. my gfs parents got a dell vostro 200 desktop, and i bumped up the cpu from a celeron D 1.6Ghz to a 1.8 or 2.0Ghz with 512MB and vista home basic. it is REALLY sluggish so i put them back to xp pro and all is well. seriously, with vista, you NEED at least 1GB of ram and an athlon64/pentium 4 2.4C of some sort to get decent performance.

Hi, I had a problem installing XP. I bought a Compaq - Celeron M440 gma945 last week, (with only FreeDOS installed). When I tried XP Pro, several of the drivers (Audio, USB, SATA harddisk, network, wireless) did not instal. I understand XP doesnot have SATA support so I disabled SATA via the BIOS). Need help in understanding why XP Pro not install these drivers? How can I go about getting the correct drivers to install? Compaq website suggests Vista. I have ony 512M RAM and donot want to upgrade RAM to 1G for now.

 

[Harvey]

Originally posted by: FortFunFoSho
All -

Need to get pretty much the cheapest laptop I can from CDW (for work reasons) and I can choose from either a HP with a Celeron or a Acer with a Sempron.

Explain to whoever authorizes the purchase that, as a business investment, the cheapest machine you can get is not necessarily the cheapest machine you can buy. They're buying a tool so the right choice is the least expensive machine that can do the job. It makes no business sense to buy any machine that will waste your paid time with sluggish performance.

Another thing you may want to check is reports from users about reliability, battery life and customer service. No matter how good the specs, or how pretty it looks, you can't expect to get your work done if the machine has a history of failures or poor support.

How will the OS run on these machines with that little ram? I am worried it will be brutal but unfortunately I am on somewhat of a cost limit.

A friend gave me his Compaq laptop as payment for some work I did so I didn't have a choice about the CPU, the amount of RAM or the OS. It came with a 1.3 GHz Celeron M and XP home. It runs a lot faster since I bumped the RAM from 256 MB to 1 GB. It'll probably be even better when I get around to a trying a 1.5 - 2.0 GHz Pentium M.

If you have a choice, get XP. Vista is far more resource hungry for both the main system and the video that uses shared RAM. On a marginal budget, you'll get far better performance with XP than with Vista.

Other things you'll want to keep you and the machine productive are a padded case to protect it when travelling and a universal USB to everything IDE adapter like this one that allows you to connect any ATA or SATA drive to your machine. You can use it to clone your notebook drive using Ghost or Acronis True Image, among other obvious handy uses. 😎

Finally, don't buy ANY machine that doesn't include a restore disk. It's not a matter of IF you'll need it, only WHEN. If you don't have one, Murphy will be looking for you. 😛

 

[KAMAZON]

Couldn't agree more with the restore CD comment. Don't even settle for the old 'oh it's on the HD' line, get a CD sent to you, if it didn't come with one, call and make sure they send it ASAP. I'd bump up the ram to 2GB, look for deals in the Hot Deals section. You WILL use it in Vista without a doubt.

 

[Rottie]

Or if there is no Restore CD it might be on your hard drive D: and you can burn Restore CD to blank DVD/CD disc.

 

[Parasitic]

Choose more memory. The new Celeron or Sempron chips are actually pretty robust and not that not watered-down compared to the full-performing counterparts.

 

[t0mn8r]

My advice is that you shouldn't attempt to run Vista (any version) with anything less than 1GB of RAM.

HTH