Real World Memory Needs of Vista

[pradeep1]

I bought my wife a cheap Acer 5160 laptop that CompUSA had on sale for $450.00 and it is actually a pretty nice and well put together machine for the price.

It is running Vista Basic Home Edition on 512MB of RAM, which it shares with an onboard graphics card. It runs fine and is surprisingly snappy for such little RAM, but you can see the memory maxed out and the page file growing as other windows are opened. So I opened her up and found out that she has a 512 MB PC5300 Hynix SODIMM, so I went on eBay and bought a matching stick, so now I will have 1GB of RAM total.

In your real world experience, 1 GB of RAM should be enough for general computing tasks with this verison of Vista, right?

 

[n7]

512 MB = too low IMO.
768-1024+ MB = minimum; quite fine for basic users.

 

[Tarrant64]

In short the answer is yes, 1gb is plenty for basic computing needs.

 

[pradeep1]

Thanks for the feedback. 1 GB it is then.

Pradeep

 

[InlineFive]

In my unofficial testing 2GB is best for Vista because of SuperFetch, games, multitasking and the like but 1GB is certaintly usable. My daily driver has 1GB and it works alright.

 

[BD2003]

If youre not gaing, 1gb is more than enough. 2gb wouldnt hurt, but youre rarely going to spill over into swap with 1gb.

 

[pradeep1]

Originally posted by: BD2003
If youre not gaing, 1gb is more than enough. 2gb wouldnt hurt, but youre rarely going to spill over into swap with 1gb.

That is what I thought. I'll probably bump up to 2 GB when prices drop further.

Thanks,

Pradeep