Waiting for a few SODIMMS in the mail to upgrade my notebook, but I went ahead and installed Vista on the stock 512mb before they got here.
It boots a LOT slower than XP did. Opening programs takes significantly longer, not only is there no superfetch, but it even has to clear out other stuff to make room.
But, once everything is open, its surprisingly snappy. Right now I've got Opera, IE, Windows Mail, Windows Calendar, Powerpoint 2007 (with a 150-slide picture heavy presentation) Word 2007, and Miranda IM running. Indexer on, sidebar on, the works. Everything but Aero, basically (card doesnt support). No readyboost stick either, but its also clean of trialware and any other extraneous memory sinks.
No matter how much stuff I open, it always seems to work to keep about 100mb or so of memory free (file cache), so it seems to do a decent job shuffling things around to make sure what youre actually using stays in memory.
I expected it to be much worse, but there you have it. Vista is usable with 512mb, with one real cavaet - don't close your programs, minimize them instead.
Either way, I'd never actually use Vista on 512mb long term. The system was just so much snappier from start to finish with 512mb on XP, since there was always much more memory headroom. It didnt need to work to shuffle things around, and I didnt need to leave programs open or anything. Once I get it back up to 1GB, it should be all good.
It boots a LOT slower than XP did. Opening programs takes significantly longer, not only is there no superfetch, but it even has to clear out other stuff to make room.
But, once everything is open, its surprisingly snappy. Right now I've got Opera, IE, Windows Mail, Windows Calendar, Powerpoint 2007 (with a 150-slide picture heavy presentation) Word 2007, and Miranda IM running. Indexer on, sidebar on, the works. Everything but Aero, basically (card doesnt support). No readyboost stick either, but its also clean of trialware and any other extraneous memory sinks.
No matter how much stuff I open, it always seems to work to keep about 100mb or so of memory free (file cache), so it seems to do a decent job shuffling things around to make sure what youre actually using stays in memory.
I expected it to be much worse, but there you have it. Vista is usable with 512mb, with one real cavaet - don't close your programs, minimize them instead.
Either way, I'd never actually use Vista on 512mb long term. The system was just so much snappier from start to finish with 512mb on XP, since there was always much more memory headroom. It didnt need to work to shuffle things around, and I didnt need to leave programs open or anything. Once I get it back up to 1GB, it should be all good.
