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4 GB May Be Vista's RAM Sweet Spot
jcatcw writes "David Short, an IBM consultant who works in the Global Services Division and has been beta testing Vista for two years, says users should consider 4GB of RAM if they really want optimum Vista performance. With Vista's minimum requirement of 512MB of RAM, Vista will deliver performance that's 'sub-XP,' he says. (Dell and others recommend 2GB.) One reason: SuperFetch, which fetches applications and data, and feeds them into RAM to make them accessible more quickly. More RAM means more caching."
How much does 4GB of ram cost? I don't know the cheapest places to buy RAM but a quick search put a couple 2GB sticks at $450-500 ($225-250 each).
Before Vista came out you could easily get a low to mid-end XP desktop computer for $500.
Ignore the FUD. We run it on everything going back to 3.5 year old P4's with crappy video cards and 512MB of ram. Does full Aero work? No. Does it work fine for Office/daily business use: Yes.
My home machine is a 18 month old P4 3.2GHZ with an upgraded (for games, $125) video card, 1gb ram, and Vista runs with full effects.
Even under the Macbook Pro (C2D, stock ram) it runs fine under paralells. You will never get Aero under virtual machines, but the OS works fine.
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Surprisingly Aero actually has little impact on system performance. It is all of that other crap like DRM running in the background that is causing everything to slow down. Overall Vista is measurably slower than XP and many applications just run like shit right now on Vista. Just running the OS and doing some surfing or email won't show much difference than XP on modern hardware.
All I know is beyond whatever the benchmarks show Explorer is even slower in Vista than it was before. Go out on the network and wait in agony while the little green bar at the top of Explorer chugs along taking forever to finally display files. I'm sure this just the fault of the switches and Windows 2003 R3 servers I've been using though *rolls eyes*. I'm just really disappointed with Vista after all of this wait and at this point the only time I boot into it anymore is to check app compatibility.
Hint - Set VLC to GDI mode so you don't have to see the f'ing jarring screen transition anymore.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Vista remembers what you run, and when. it loads all this into ram before your going to need it.
The sweet spot for memory will be vista requirements(512mb or so) + space for whatever apps you usualy concurrently run, IE/FF, photoshop, iTunes, whatever, it'll dump those into system ram before you even click their icons, reduce real world loading times significantly.
Despite the MS jokes, an OS that leaves ram unused isnt doing its job properly, it can always free memory , quickly, if needed.
Almost all intel processors, starting with the pentium pro, support PAE, which allows up to 64Gb of RAM. This was supported only by the Advanced and Datacenter server editions of Win2k, and by the enterprise version of Win2k3. Unix operating systems, however, have very good support for PAE. For a single application to be able to use more that 4Gb of RAM, though, it needs to be properly written to be PAE aware. Without using PAE, the maximum memory available for a single app is 3Gb on Windows.
Loading up all that RAM takes a lot of time and shows poor design. If you've got XGB of RAM, you may as well *use* it to cache commonly used data etc. and speed up your system, rather than just have it sit there like a lemon. Please tell me how doing this "shows poor design"?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Since most environments run more than one process, they can take advantage of the extra ram assuming their total amount of allocated space is above 4GB. For that matter, I used to run a 32bit version of BSD 5 years ago that ran on a Dual PIII system with 8GB RAM. Basically we ran 2 caching processes of 4GB each, and some smaller processes that added up to a memory load of 8GB.
What you get with a 64bit operating system is a theoretical 64bit address space for each and every process. In reality different processor architectures offer somewhere between 40 and 48 bits worth of physical address space (Good for almost a Petabyte of RAM). 64bit is really only useful for a few VERY large applications such as Database, a few imaging processing apps, and some massive number crunching... Your average desktop OS application has no need for more than 32 bits, and in fact most of us would actually have slower machines with a 32bit user space
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
It's a good plan. RAM density and processor speed has mostly followed Moore's law in transistor density. While disk storage density has followed suit, the I/O path hasn't followed suit. The typical SATA drive might burst ~70MB/s, but it still sustains ~40MB/s just like good 'old PATA.
All modern OS's load huge executables compared with the good 3M workstation days (1 Megabyte, 1 Megapixel, 1 MIP). Microsoft is doing the right thing by aggressively caching commonly run items. And I note, they're late to the party: 'NIX does this too.
And I say once again (as a NIX professional) that Vista's pretty damn good. Gone are the days when Windows was a toy. No longer. It has plenty of bullshit legacy cruft, but Vista is a BIG improvement.
It is not flamebait It is true. Until recently I was running OS X on a 667 Mhz 1Gb RAM powerbook. which as 4 1/2 years old. And it ran the latest version of OS X quite well. Not quite at the sweet spot but good enough to get most of my work done. Granted my new MacBook Pro outperforms it in every respect, but still it ran well enough no to be annoying.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Then simply buy it "anywhere else" and plug it in. You can do that, you know. Doesn't even void your warranty. Easy to do, even on their laptops (the slots are usually accessible underneath the battery or underneath the keyboard.)
There another anti-Mac-troll bashed with truth.