Is 2 gig of ram a lot better for vista than 1?

I was thinking that I could simply order the parts myself and install them, but I'm not sure what kind of Ram it takes. I've seen some for about 30$ for 2 gigs on tigerdirect. Not sure why its 100$ just to upgrade to 2 gigs on dell..

 

Simple answer...because its Dell. They assume you dont anything about computers...so they change you a ton for something you can do in less than a minute and for much less money

 

To answer the title of this thread... yes.

 

yes you need 2 gigs, it is the mainstream standard nowdays..

 

Almost every laptop right now takes 200-pin DDR2 667MHz SODIMM.

 

i guess AERO needs 2GB to run properly

 

What Dell laptop are you getting?

The laptop probably takes DDR2-667 PC2-5300/5400 200-Pin So-dimm. Check the ram deals thread(look at the first and last couple of pages) for some deals.

As mentioned, 2GB is recommended for Vista

 

Yeah i just plan to order the inspiron 1420 with 1gig of ram first then upgrae it myself. I'm just not sure what type of ram it takes. It would be awesome if i could just get a 2 gig piece and replace a 512, and keep the other.

 

Cant you get it with 1x1024 ?

 

Sure, if you upgrade to 2 gigs.. They have corsair ram for laptops on their website for 50$ (2 gigs 1 dimm)

 

If you call dell and tell them u want 1x1024 and then just get another 2gb stick and youll have 3gb

 

i just called them up and they said that they don't have that option.. I guess ill just have a spare 512 stick heh

 

yeh u need 2 gigs mine at idle uses about 1.3gig

 

yes. Definately. I was using 1 gb for a while, but adding that extra gig really makes a difference in the speed of many applications.

 

Yeah, mine takes about a gig on idle. But I did some tweaking and disabled some services.. Vista loads tons of services that are not always needed by most users. Sadly, Vista is such the beast that 2 gigs.. or at least 1.5 gigs is needed for decent performance. Its amazing that they even ship some bare bones systems with only 512. I saw one of those and it was so slow that it was pretty much unusable. Don't expect much if any performance gains from the new SP either. Although its suppose to fix the file transfer bug on networks. There is no excuse for bugs like that on a final code release.

The point is, XP will outperform Vista with half the memory and is faster on most productivity benchmarks. Theres something wrong with that if you ask me.

 

I ran Vista with 512MB of RAM (trying to install kb929777 and using bcdedit to limit the RAM to 512MB) and it was an utter joke - slow as mollases and constantly paged to and from the harddrive. Glad it was just a one time boot. Anyone offering Vista with 512MB is having a laugh.

Vista does manage memory quite cleverly to try and make your system as nippy as possible. Why does everyone want memory not being used? ust in case you need it? If it aint being used it's redundant. Vista will load things into memory that it thinks you may need which is quicker than going to the hard drive to get it. If you then require that memory for something else Vista will relinquish it without a second thought. So there really is no problem with Vista using your RAM - that's what it's there for. It doesn't keep it in memory cache if something more needy comes along. The only problem is that it does require a certain minimum level of RAM but hey - that's progress.

I paid for all this RAM and I'm gonna use it