Windows Vista Will Vista be OK with 512 RAM

I've had vista sitting on my shelf for a month now, not installed. I have 512MB of 266MHz RAM.
I hear some have reported a Gig is low, and the "sweet spot" is 2GB. I know I need more then 512, but how will it run with the 512MB?

Has anyone used Vista on 512MB of RAM? How did it work? Thank you,
Chris.

 

I started out with 640mb and premium ran fine for me. now I have a 1gig and is the same to mee but my son complained about WOW being choppy on Vista.

 

For Vista Home Premium, I cannot have a stable environment before putting up to 1.5 GB RAM.

 

I have Vista Business running on an old P3 Thinkpad with 768MB Ram
No aero on the intel graphics, but runs fine enough

Spotta

 

Hello Chris,

Ultimate on a HP Laptop - 1 gig of RAM and runs smoothly.

As important if not more so is the Processor and graphics card and the drivers for the graphics card.

Regards - Charles

 

Be more precise, I am not expecting to run only Vista like a Vista Demo Machine. Perhaps 512 MB is good enough for that purpose.

What my expectation is to have Vista up and smoothly running, and I can put up some other software that I used to run under XP Prof SP2. I compare apple to apple the memory requirements realistically and practically.

With the above expectation, I am happy to run Vista Home Premium only after I upgraded the RAM to 1.5 GB.

 

1.5 GB RAM (75% used, 25% reserved for working space) and my applications are:

Windows Vista Home Premium
Windows Defender
Norton Internet Security
Outlook 2003 (can't use Business Contact Manager which also run SQL Desktop Engine) with dual personal folders only.
Word 2003
Excel 2003
PowerPoint 2003
Windows Live Messenger 8.1
Skype 3.0 (without video)
IE7 (multiple tags on multiple windows) with Google Search add-on.
Sidebar with 4 -6 gadgets
Asus MultiFrame
BatteryLife
Printer Driver
Scanner Driver
3G Mobile Connection

*MindManager X5 (RAM eater)
*Adobe Reade 7 (for reference to e-book)
* iTunes
*LimeWire
*Google Earth
*Maya 8 (RAM eater)

note: * open on demand.

 

I've been running Vista RC2 for quite a while now. 1 gig of ram and it runs just fine. I'm one that usually has all kinds of stuff open. It has no problem handling whatever I throw at it.

 

Hmmm...interesting 1GB

Hmmm... It seems that many of you feel good with 1GB RAM on Vista. Let me take a chance to reduce the RAM back to 1GB and see what happens...

 

I tested VistaHome Premium running on a P4, 2.6 ghz machine with 512 RAM. No Aero however, the system was running acceptably. I now have it running on a P4, 3.0 ghz machine with 2 gb RAM. Much sweeter and I do have Aero. You make the call

 

Thanks for the replys. I sometims do video editing so I didn't want to have my machine bog down with Vista. Looks like I'll have to waite for awhile to run it.

I want to first get a 19in LCD Widescreen Monitor. THEN more RAM.
Chris.

 

I ran some of the beta's on my laptop with 512 mB of RAM - it was slow, but it did work OK. Some tweaking of the settings to limit the graphics work seemed to help it out quite a bit.

I run the release version of Ultimate on the same laptop with 1 gB of RAM and it works quite well without the tweaks.

 

Vista RAM management disappointed

Recap that my notebook has 1.5 GB RAM.

70% of time it is fine to run just Microsoft Office 2003 with Words. When I ran Excel, and Outlook 2003, it slowed down and began to show hiccups. Physical Memory Usage History from the Task Manager showed that about 600 MB RAM were being used. It unaccceptably slowed after I got it back from the "sleep" mode. 90% after returning from "sleep" mode, I needed to reboot eventually.

Even worse, when I was making copies of DVD by cloneDVD 4, Nero Express 8.0, or even just copying files from one harddisk to another. Physical Memory used up to 1.34 GB. The two CPUs on Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz were initially sharing well, until the moment that screen saver was turned back on. Even the mouse pointer movement had troubles. Task Manager had no response. IE had no response. All RAM was allocated to the copying software until it finished. For the same application on my another Windows XP notebook, there has been no problem of the same kind, even though the CPU speed is less than half of my new notebook with 512 MB.

I am not sure if things work better for 2 GB RAM. I don't think so.

Who has a view about it?

 

Hi,
I am running windows vista ultimate with 512mb of ram it runs very well after seraching "optimize vista" on google

 

I have been running Vista since the early Beta days. I had to progressively upgrade the RAM. Bear in mind that I was really putting Vista through it's extreme paces. I found that at 1.5, it performed most functions smoothly. It gave "hiccup" problems with Internet gaming. With 2 Gbs, I have not detected any problems that I would not have encountered in XP. Above that figure there does not appear to be any significant change.

 

Vista does not release physical memory

I think it's not the matter how much RAM do you have, it's the matter how memory is being managed by Vista.

Today, my 1.5 GB RAM Vista notebook slowed down again, after running update of Norton Internet Security, while I am using Excel and Outlook 2003. That's all. 97% physical memory was occupied and CPU was only 13%. I let the notebook idle for 10 minutes, and no change!

Dead slow and even the Task Manager had not responded. I rebooted it, and physical memory usage dropped back to 53% max and 5 minutes after reboot, it dived back to 25%.

********
Yesterday I opened a large document 150 pages with Adobe Reader 7.0, memory used up and after I closed the Adobe Reader, memory did not release. Reboot resolved the problem.

Any expert to explain and resolve the problem?

 

Not an expert on this by any means - but running an AV program will generally eat up anything that you're trying to do. My copy of AVG free kicks off it's morning scans in my XP VM and my Vista at the same time. Even with 3.25 gB of RAM things slow way down!

I'd leave Task Manager open to the Processes tab and keep an eye on what's hogging the CPU. You can also go to View...Select Columns and put a checkmark in the IO Reads item to check on disk reads that may be slowing you down.

What's your Performance score on the laptop? What areas are the weakest? Since you've got a Core 2 Duo - I wouldn't think it's the CPU. Your memory is more than adequate - so I wouldn't think that that's it. This doesn't seem to be a video issue to me - so ruling that out we're left with the hard drive. A 5400 rpm laptop hard drive with little cache may be the issue here. But a close examination of the Processes tab in Task Manager will tell the story.