Windows Vista Ram For Vista

Hi, I have read that to boost Ram on Vista you can stick in your USB Stick and Vista will draw from it. Does that mean that if you only have 512 MB of Ram and you would like to run your PC on the recomended 1 GIG that all you have to do is stick a 512 MB USB Stick in, that sounds to simple to me.
Can anyone explain??
hawk22

 

It'll be a speed thing. An OS will use the hard disk as RAM if you use more memory than you have physical memory installed. However, you get a performance drop because the hard disk access speed is a lot slower than RAM access speed. CPUs have very fast connections to your main RAM. It's the fastest bus on the motherboard. Access to any other bus is going to be significantly slower. So you can use a memory stick for RAM, but it will be limited by the speed of the USB bus.

512 RAM + 512 USB is always going to be slower than 1024 RAM.

Therefore, if you are desperate, using a USB memory stick may be a useful way to temporarily boost the RAM, but upgrading the main system RAM is going to give you much better performance.

 

thanks guys, I think I will wait for some time before I will consider Vista I can see many good points, but still a lot of uncertainty as well.
thanks
hawk22

 

Thanks Steve for the link to the RedyBoost Toms Hardware article. I had forgotten about this feature of Vista.
I have an under used 1GB USB stick that I'll try out when my Vista Business edition arrives as part of the Guaranteed upgrade that MS are currently offering on XP Pro purchases.
Hopefully the 1GB of DDR System memory and 1GB USB stick memory will give my P4 2.8 system another couple of years a life.

 

Hawk22,
I'll be interested to hear if the Aero desktop runs with the added 512 of USB2 memory. As I understand it, the Aero desktop won't run on a system with 512K of memory. Vista Basic edition is aimed at these PC's. But the extra USB RAM should work?

Paul.

 

I was getting Broadband bits mixed up with RAM bits.

To be fair though, Vista will run like a dog with only 512MB RAM. Probably similar to XP with 128MB RAM. It uses nearly all that just to run the OS, Although I believe the basic version is less hungry. But yes, the MINIMUM requirements for the Graphics card to run Aero, is something like a Geforce 5200+ and 128MB RAM in Nvidia speak.

 

I'm thinking of getting 2GB's of RAM. Or at least 1 1/2GB's. What do you guys think? Too much? I have a P M Centrino 1.73GHz, and an ATIFire GL video card with 128MB of video RAM. I mainly do browsing, I do still run AOL (yea, yea, I know. ), FireFox, maybe some Adobe and I want to enjoy my UXGA display....Hmmm...

Thanks guys.

 

Yea, I hear you on the 1.5 gigs at a minimum, but then again, why not go all the way? What laptop are you getting? I can't wait for mine to arrive.

 

I got my Laptop with 1 gig, spending the money on the T7200 Dual Core thinking if I really needed more RAM, I could upgrade.

Of course HP split the two Dimm's 512/512 instead of putting a single 1022 stick in it

The advantage to that is if one fails, but still.....

Regards - Charles

 

Hi Steve,

Good question - didn't think of that.

Regards - Charles

 

For RAM... "Some is good, more is better" - until you reach the limit imposed by the OS (I've got 4 gB, but Vista 32 bit will only recognize 3.25 gB)

 

Hi John,

Maybe maybe not - depends on what you're doing and the hardware.

Then there is something called price/performance ratio. Doubling RAM doesn't equal doubling performance.

I've always been aware of what's running on my systems and understand how to deal with superfluous processes/apps.

Regards - Charles

 

Oooh! Nice specs!! I decided against the Core Duo, so that I could afford the UXGA display. 2GB is the max for me. I am a reseller, so I can always get a T60 Core Duo when the prices come down a little.

What's a FreeDOS OS Kit? Hmm...