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."

Comments

Re:x64

[sepiid]

was gonna say, you toss 4g in a 32bit box you will only see about 3gig. unless you go 64bit, but then you will see even less driver support available

Re:Turn SuperFetch off

[SEMW]

"More RAM means more caching."
Well, Duh... You say it's obvious; but it's amazing how many Slashdot posts I've seen which consist of "I've got XGB of RAM [where X>1] and Vista's using up 75% of it running the OS alone; therefore Vista must need XGB of RAM to even run, never mind applications!" -- conveniently ignoring that Vista's just using the extra RAM to cache frequently used apps, documents, etc., and it'll automatically be freed up if any application requests it...

Re:Turn SuperFetch off

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I remember the $40/MB RAM!

OS/2 reccomended 4MB
Vista? 4GB

Too bad we aren't doing exponetially better things with these boxes...

Windows Vista Capable according to Dell

[tritone]

From Dell's website A Windows Capable PC has 512 MB RAM and is "Great for... Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games.

Re:Seriously

[SilentChris]

Twenty years ago I remember an 80-character email program my school used that required remembering about 40 shortcuts. None of them were displayed. You could work on one email at a time -- that's it. There was no GUI email program with easy to understand menus. There was no way to work on more than one email at a time. You were fortunate if you got copy and paste.

Twenty years ago I remember the "media" I "collected". Amazing 256-color graphic files. Mostly of stupid things like bowls of fruit (porn really wasn't all it was cracked up to be at the time). No pictures of family and friends in high detail. No means of easily storing said photos for extended periods of time.

Twenty years ago I remember when a "state of the art" game was one that wasn't entirely text-based. When an adventure game's inventory had a max of 16 items and enemies were scripted (and therefore dumb as bricks). No photorealistic visuals to draw you in. No fairly natural AI to breathe life to the world. And certainly no way to play with thousands of others at the same time.

My point?

All of these changes have been the result of higher memory, faster processors, etc. Yes, we use a bigger memory footprint nowadays. So what? Isn't broadening the appeal of the PC (families storing photos and grandmothers that can actually work the email program) worth it? Yes, the fundamental operations haven't changed (write email, send email, etc). Big deal. Call that a testament to stellar original design than a foible of modern design.

Fact of the matter is I *can* do more, much more, than I could with my PC from 20 years ago. And I can do it in an easier way (blame Vista/OS X all you want -- they're still better UIs than what we used in '87). That's called "progress", regardless if the memory footprint grows or not (and the fundamental tenants of computing stay largely the same).

speed, speed and more speed - but where is it?

[SimonInOz]

Some time back (ok, 1979) I built a system to monitor a Dutch nuclear reactor. It monitored temperatures, rod positions, and so on. Nothing important (cough). There was no suggestion of keeping costs down to save money (and I'm glad).

The system had two colour graphic displays, a printer or two, and 4 operator terminals. It ran a real time, multi tasking operating system (called RSX11).

The main system had 128kb of memory. Yes, 128kb.

Today my dev machine has 2Gb of memory and the 3Ghz processor must - surely - be some thousands of times as fast.
So I have 15,000 times as much memory, a processor perhaps 3,000 times as fast (I'm guessing, as figures are hard to pin down). That sounds like 445 million times as much power to me.

And what do we do with all this grunt? Well damn, solitare looks good these days.

So, were the old programmers really, really good? [We were, we were ...]
Are the new ones really, really bad? [hang on, I'm still at it ...]
Have we stopped caring about size and performance of programs?

I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't.
I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well. Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.

And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.

Re:speed, speed and more speed - but where is it?

[pilkul]

In industry almost everybody uses loops instead of recursion unless there's a really good reason to use recursion (e.g. tree traversal). More because of readability than efficiency; in principle your optimizer should be able to convert tail recursion to iteration anyway (though whether this will actually happen or not does depend on the specific language and implementation). Academics just love recursion because it maps neatly to mathematical induction and hence makes algorithm correctness more easily provable.

The reason "bloat" happens is more because programming teams have deadlines and if there's a choice between a new feature, a bugfix or some not-strictly-necessary optimization (and there's always a choice), the optimization's never going to get done. It's just good business sense; sure everybody complains about slowness, but if application A is mean-and-lean and application B is bloated but has a feature you need to do your job, you'll whine and cavil and buy B anyway.

Re:THis is obscene!

[WillAffleckUW]

Turn off aero. Turn on "Windows Classic" desktop theme. You're good to go with 1GB of memory. Microsoft could tell you the same thing, but then the best features that they offer in this bloated release won't even be used (and it is these features MS is stressing based on print ads and commercials).

But if you turn off Aero and all that stuff, why bother upgrading in the first place?

So that you can see the Black Screen of Are You Sure You Want To Run That Program?

But take a look at *cost*

[mcrbids]

Have we stopped caring about size and performance of programs?

No. But our limits of acceptability have changed. As processing power has gotten cheaper, developers (myself included) have focused more on getting features out to market faster, rather than application performance.

I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't.

That's always been correct. We care more about how many features are available at what cost, so long as performance isn't noticably bad on commodity hardware.

Do you remember when c was considered a "high level language"? What about the debates on how slow programs written in c were? I do. Times have changed....

I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well.

I don't know about that. Perhaps you don't remember loading DOS programs like PC-Write on an 8086 processer with 512K RAM? That was my word processor of choice, and it got slower the longer your document was. By the time you passed 100k, it was a dog.

Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.

I sure do. I also remember the care with with I never hit the two space bars together in a graphics program. (That would universally crash my computer). It shared TEXT ok, but anything graphical was another mess entirely.

And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.

If you don't mind me asking, what would you RATHER be writing?

Re:More RAM

[MojoStan]

Had a friend who tried to buy a Dell box today. They wouldn't sell it to him with XP on it; only Vista. Does the friend know that "business" Dell PCs (e.g. Optiplex desktops, Latitude notebooks, Precision workstations) can be configured with XP? Only the "home" PCs (e.g. Dimension desktops, Inspiron notebooks) are restricted to Vista only. (Dimensions and Inspirons are also sold in the "business" section, but they are really meant for home users.)

I can only imagine what kind of deals Dell and MSFT have cut... I think it's reasonable to believe that phasing out XP support might be worth the relatively few sales they lose by not offering XP to home users. Maybe my imagination should be more cynical.