Do you think that 2GB of memory will be fine for Vista in 2 years?

I just put in an order for an HEL80 and this has been bothering me a bit. When I first started searching I had support for more than 2gb of memory as one of my must haves. It turned out that none of the notebooks with this fulfilled my other must haves so I sacrificed this.

I am looking to keep this machine for at least 3 years and will probably be running Vista. I tend to use about 700mb regularly on my XP system so I figure that 2GB should cover me for now, but what about in 3 years?

With XP, 256mb was fine when it first came out, then it creep up to 512mb and that was pretty decent for a while, but now I consider 1gb to be the sweet spot for XP. So do you guys think this will happen with Vista as well or will 2gb be fine?

 

Not for any serious work. You courd read anands review. 3GB is the sweet spot even for today.

 

I think 2GB will be fine for the forseeable future--if you find that you need more than 2GB of memory, you'll also probably need a new computer. If you do need 3GB, you can probably upgrade cheaper through newegg or somewhere rather than Compal.

A lot depends on the kind of applications you'll be running. I have 1.5 right now in Vista and experience no problems.

villageman, would you mind linking the article?

 

Generally, I use...

Firefox
Outlook 2003
AIM
WeBuilder 2007
EnginSite PHP Editor
Navicat
MS Access
Excel 2003
Winamp (ripping CDs, ripping a webstream and listening to music at the same time sometimes)
ImToo DVD Ripper
Notepad
Logmein.com
Windows Explorer

Sometimes I'll have pretty much all of those going at the same time and also need Photoshop open.

So I can use memory up with the best of them, but i'm not a gamer either so i've got that going for me.

 

Of course, it depends on what you do, and what apps you run. It's not like XP started magically needing more memory. It's that games required more, and as more ram became available, software designers found new ways to use it... I've run XP with 512 recently, and done just fine. I wasn't doing anything demanding, just your basic browsing (50~ tabs though ), email, chat, video, old games.

I haven't tried to run Vista on that amount, but it runs just fine on a gig. I can see how three would be better if the OS is smart about it, but there's nothing wrong with one.

I guess what I'm getting at is, if two is fine today, it will be fine tomorrow, as long as you aren't doing highly demanding ram-intensive stuff... audio/video editing, cad/modeling, or high end games. I think your graphics card will limit you on games before the ram does. Also, most laptops are limited to two gigs right now, if not by hardware then by price. (Have you seen what a two-gig stick of smallram goes for?)

 

I guess what I was getting at was more of what you said about how as more memory becomes available programmers become less efficient. I mean I remember my old 386 with 4mb of memory. Most office apps did the same **** they do now, but were written more efficiently since there was less memory to work with.

I like to run the latest versions of software so that I've got all the latest features and such so if I continue like that, I'm sure my demand for memory will go up.

As for the cost, a 2gb stick of memory costs a lot now, but just like always, that will drop a lot over the next couple of years.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=3

 

What I am abstracting from that article is that if you double the memory you use for XP you'll be fine in Vista which is how I've been seeing it based on my own use of Vista.

So I guess it'll really just come down to software programmers and just how inefficient they choose to be over the next few years.

 

I think by the time you need more than 2GB of RAM, 64 bit will be more popular, because 32 bit Windows can't address all 4GB.

3GB seems like an odd amount. You won't benefit from dual channel memory because the rams aren't identical.

So 2GB will be fine for most people. However, if you need more than that, you should consider 64 bit Vista.

 

3GB Dual Channel from a laptop with 2+1GB. You DONT need to have identical DIMMS to have dual channel. On a desktop you can even configure dual channel with 3 DIMMS.