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Yes it is worth getting 4GB of Ram for Vista

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EricMartello

Senior member
Even if you are running the 32-bit Vista, you should get yourself 4GB of ram. In most cases Vista will see 3.5 GB, sometimes 3 GB. Either way that's at least 1 more GB of extra physical memory and it makes a huge and noticeable difference. You'll almost never hear your hard drive, apps will start in seconds, alt-tabbing is instantaneous...it's great! If and when you go 64-bit, you'll be able to access that extra .5 GB. Do it.
 
I have 4GB in vista64bit. i just started running out of ram. Games crash, slowdowsn occur, etc...
Sure I am always running torrents and I tend to have 100 open tabs in chrome and firefox in the background, but so what, I love my background processes. The advant of "keep tabs between sessions" in firefox and chrome means I only close a page when I am done with it, so i have a lot of open pages waiting to be read. Wikipedia pages, review pages,etc.
Choosing between spending 25$ on extra 4GB of ram, or closing the browsers before playing a game, I chose to get more ram. It should arrive tommorow for 8GB goodness.
 
It's worth keeping this info fresh because there are a lot of people still running Vista with 2 GB or less. Doing a public service thing. 🙂
 
i tried to do it, but some of us running older hardware have trouble running 4x1gb DDR.🙁 now i have 2x1GB DDR dual channel kits that i can keep switching back and forth between, but can't run em all together! Fantastic! the other 2 sticks make great decorations on my desk though. very tech savy.
 
Ok. I didn't notice any difference going from 2x1GB to 4x1GB with 32-bit Vista except that memory performance is slightly worse with everest. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough...
 
I'm using 2x2GB DDR2 @ 1066 MHz. 5-5-5-15 timings...same speed as the memory it replaced. The difference for me has been very noticeable, especially with the apps and games loading faster as well as the hard drive rarely being accessed.
 
Originally posted by: Scoop
Ok. I didn't notice any difference going from 2x1GB to 4x1GB with 32-bit Vista except that memory performance is slightly worse with everest. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough...
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you only notice it if you run out. run more memory hungry tasks.
 
They need 3 GB memory sticks, or 1.5 GB memory sticks, and you can buy 2 of them. Would be the most efficient for 32-bit operating systems...
 
Originally posted by: postmortemIA
Originally posted by: aeternitas
Anyone running 32bit Vista is a tool.
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you are tool. there's no advantage of 64-bit over 32-bit especially on netbooks and laptops with less than 4GB of RAM.
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wrong, that is a strawmen argument. People have been lauding the ram when it is the least important (albeit useful) feature of 64bit. 64bit brings in more registrars and enhanced performance. Theoretically 4-5 (400-500% speed increase, 500-600% total speed) times faster performance. In testing of hash calculations it is 2x-3x faster. I tested it on 7z compression to be 27% faster (1.27x the speed), and it appears to be about 3-5x times faster (its hard to measure, unlike the 7z which was an exact test) when loading a 64bit browser with a bunch (100+) of tabs preopened (saved sessions)... Oh, and those shut down significantly faster too... Oh, and I tested that on pages without flash.

It is also completely impractical to run ZFS, a 128bit filesystem, in 32bit mode, it is too slow. But the speed is much greater on the same CPU in 64bit mode. (as it should, its doing 128bit calculations, and before you point out how "unusual" that is, PLENTY of applications need to handle 64bit or 128bit data... which is just not efficient on a 32bit processor).
 
interesting info taltamir, and here i thought it was only for the ability to use 4gb + ram. thanks for the info.
 
Well I am at 2 gb with an e6400 running vista. I have 8 tabs open in opera, 1 200+ picture folder open, am transfering files to and from two hard drives, installing a game, running vlc, and have other background programs and I experience no lag unless I scroll through the pictures extremely fast. I guess I don't really see the point yet.
 
... shouldn't you first try 4GB and compare the speeds before you say its unncessary? "i put 4GB and it wasn't any faster" is a better argument than "well golly gee its sure is plenty fast, why would I even try to see if it can be faster"...
I have yet to see anyone who went from 2 to 4GB of vista and didn't think it was faster.
 
I have been on computers with 4gb of ram and I really don't see the difference. I am sure that there are certain circumstances where it would preform better but I haven't seen many of them. I think it is kind of like the dual core vs quad core thing. Yea quad is nice but how many programs are quad threaded. I can see it as a way of "futurproofing" though.
 
Originally posted by: spacecowboy9891
I have been on computers with 4gb of ram and I really don't see the difference. I am sure that there are certain circumstances where it would preform better but I haven't seen many of them. I think it is kind of like the dual core vs quad core thing. Yea quad is nice but how many programs are quad threaded. I can see it as a way of "futurproofing" though.
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Just play a memory intensive game, like Company of Heroes and GTA4, and you'll see that going from 2 gb to 4 gb of ram, makes a hell lot of a difference in Vista. This is just an example, since there are a lot of other games that will need more then 2 gb of ram to run as they should on Vista.

Oh and the superfetch thingy, will really get everything faster on your pc, when you add more ram. There will be way more programs kept in ram, ready to be loaded at a click of a mouse, on 4 gb opposed to 2 gb. Even more of them will be on a system with 8gb. 😉
 
Originally posted by: spacecowboy9891
I have been on computers with 4gb of ram and I really don't see the difference. I am sure that there are certain circumstances where it would preform better but I haven't seen many of them. I think it is kind of like the dual core vs quad core thing. Yea quad is nice but how many programs are quad threaded. I can see it as a way of "futurproofing" though.
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its not future proofing if you use programs that are multi threaded. And ram is a lot more useful right now than extra cores. (not that those are not useful).

Same with the ram... try running a ram intensive modern game, many take near 2GB of space by themselves. Or opening a lot of windows in a browser.

Let me put it this way, you are the extremely rare exception to the rule.
 
Because now it's trying to do more work than I want it too and it really slows it down since it's trying to load more than I want or need.
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But it doesn't actually, you think it does, but have you tested it to show that its faster without superfetch?
Also, try having more than one firefox window open at a time.
 
what a placebo effect. vista is so inefficient that you need 4GB of RAM?

all these games mentioned are 32-bit only, so they are going to run exactly the same on 64-bit and 32-bit OS and will both be able to use up to 2GB of RAM.

could 4GB of RAMhelp? it could, but it might not, depending of your use
will 64-bit help? yes, if you use 64-bit app, and so far there are 0 mentioned such apps on here. All of you 64-bit happy users are running 32-bit software on 64-bit OS.

by the way, I use both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista. Hands down, 64-bit version has more advantages, but it is not must-have right now.
 
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