How much RAM does Vista really need?
By John Lister
Microsoft recently came as close as it’s going to get to admitting 1GB of memory doesn’t cut it for Vista. But now there’s a claim that even 2GB really isn’t a practical amount.
Officially the minimum spec for all but the Home Basic editions of Vista is 1GB of RAM. However, in a recent guide to finetuning Vista performance, Microsoft suggested at least 2GB for “good results, especially for higher knowledge worker scenarios.”
TechRadar’s Jeremy Laird recently wrote an article arguing that because Vista uses so much memory itself (as much as 700MB just to run), 2GB simply isn’t enough memory to cope with running multiple memory-hungry applications at once.
He also points to Vista’s 2GB addressing space barrier, which means that in the ‘standard’ 32-bit edition, even if you do have more memory there’s still a maximum 2GB available to any one particular application. That’s proving to be problematic among the latest video games. It’s not a problem specific to Vista, or even a bug as such – it’s simply a fundamental barrier in 32-bit systems.
If you share Laird’s argument that Vista needs 4GB, it helps explain some of the common complaints about Vista’s performance. Among computers sold in the past few years (which you’d expect the latest edition of Windows to work well on), particularly with desktops, 2GB isn’t a particularly strong demand. And many, if not most machines with a lower spec can be fairly easily upgraded: not everyone is willing to open up their PC, but fitting new memory is probably the least intimidating procedure for the casual user.
However, once you start requiring 4GB, you are ruling out a lot of relatively modern machines which simply aren’t set up for that size of memory.
It’s only fair to point out that Vista does come with ReadyBoost, a technology that can use flash memory such as USB drives as a makeshift increase in memory. Specifically this technique allows a computer to cache to the memory stick rather than a hard drive, which makes for faster performance. But it’s clearly not an ideal solution.
TechRadar quotes one games developer as saying Microsoft should offer a patch to remove the 2GB address barrier in Vista. That doesn’t seem particularly likely, but the evidence is mounting that Microsoft needs to think carefully about how much memory it’s realistic to expect Windows 7 PCs to have, and then be as frank as possible in publicising those specs.
It also raises more questions about whether Windows 7, which will likely be the ‘standard’ edition of Windows until at least 2013, is really feasible in a 32-bit edition.
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August 20th, 2008
-For anyone who bought an 80gb PS3 got screwed.
-For anyone who bought a 60gb PS3 (myself included) got double screwed.
-For anyone who bought a 40gb PS3 got tripled screwed.
-And for anyone who bought a 20gb PS3……well they just got flat out bukkaked by Sony. Thanks Sony for nothing!
August 20th, 2008
How much RAM does Vista really need?
Way too much.
A one GB RAM laptop running Vista and the same laptop dual boot running Ubuntu (Linux) 8.04 LTS.
600 MB Ram for just the desktop and nothing else running in Vista.
190 MB Ram for the desktop and nothing else running in Ubuntu 8.04.
August 22nd, 2008
Actually Vista will detect more than 2gb of ram. The 32 bit barrier technically says that 32 bit computers can not access more than 4gb of ram. From experience, a computer running Vista with 4GB or ram will usually only report between 3-4GB. My only non-apple computer is now running vista, and while it has 4GB of ram, it only reports 3.5GB.
August 23rd, 2008
Ralph is quite correct to say that the answer is “way too much”.
I have recently set up a Fedora Linux QEMU (virtual) mail server running on a Fedora host. The mail server is bare-bones for security and performance, and it is running happily on 256MB (in fact, being a virtual server, it is not running a GUI, and would actually run fine with 192MB of memory). The physical PC on which this is set up has 2GB of memory, so it is a simple calculation to determine that there is sufficient memory to accommodate several QEMU virtual servers on this particular hardware.
So, I have one virtual server set up, and plenty of room for more, on a PC would wouldn’t even handle *one* instance of Vista well. This is indicative of a BIG problem for Microsoft, who seem to have somehow missed the fact that the business world is going down the path of virtualisation - where OS efficiency is quite important (as my example shows).
The sad fact is that Vista is bloatware, and is therefore particularly unsuitable for deployment in a business context. Vista means additional hardware costs, higher costs (both monetary and environmental) in terms of power consumption, productivity losses from poor performance, and the costs associated with software vendor lock in (how soon will you have to migrate to the “next version” of Windows?). What business in its right mind is going to forgo profits in order to hamstring itself and line Microsoft’s pockets?
September 27th, 2008
YOUR ON CRACK! I have vista with 1gb ram and i just got done gaming. “The minimum is 512mb” I only use 300 to 400 idle with aero and sidebar junk. And when you start doing things vista gives the ram back. (as much as 700MB just to run) ROFLMAO is his junk broken? People like you who troll and smoke crack really need to stop spreading FUD! Vista uses like what 100mb more OMFG get a life would ya?