might buy 4 gigs of ram...

will i see a noticable difference? i rarely go above 1gig usage with 2 gigs.

 

If that is all you have, then you probably won't unless Vista manages to pre-fetch more.

 

yea.. for some reason my gut tells me that 2 extra gigs will make at least some noticeable differences in vista which manages to utilize all the RAM it can. I'm personally going to 4 gigs over the summer. helps wen you write papers, surf internet, research, and play call of duty and crysis at the same time.

 

windows (in general) is set to use about half of your available ram as standard. The more ram you have, the more it uses. Idling my system uses ~1.75GB of my 4GB (I'm assuming thats the max vista will use as standard). Currently it's using 2.2GB - I have alot running in the background...

 

I wud say it depends on what softwares you use.

 

Yes, heavy image editing software such as PS can sometimes take up to 1-2 GB of RAM

 

might as well get 4GB total, a gain in performance is a gain in performance. plus it'll probably help with the resell value later on when newer RAM becomes available in the future and the current RAM (probably DDR3 replacing DDR2) becomes harder to find making it more valuable.

 

yes you will notice the difference. especially with vista. the more free ram you have the more vista will use.. i notice the difference 100%

 

Hey, you can never have enough RAM!
Xp handles 2 gigs ok, Vista requires at least 3 to be happy.
But I guess 4 GB is enough for anything.

 

dang. i forgot to mention i'm using xp. and i passed out after i posted this thread. i'm not thrilled about vista. i've been able to get some hands on with it, helping my neighbors get it going. yuck. but i might able able to go vista64, and i was wondering if i could dual boot a 64 and 32 bit os.

 

You can dual boot. And with 4 gigs of RAM, you won`t have problems with vista. And with SP1 now available, things should be even smoother.

 

Its not that you have a lot running the background, the more ram you got the more Vista dedicates to system resources... a good thing

 

Thats what i said, vista uses 1.75, then when i have lots of stuff running as well, it uses up to ~2.2 It's currently using 1.88 with a few things running (itunes, cpuid HWmonitor, firefox 3, steam, lots of sidebar stuff, kaspersky, utorrent, thunderbird, soundcard apps, messenger, skype, ultramon, setpoint, hotkey poller, epson monitor)

EDIT: I love the way I call that 'a few things'...On my first PC that much would've crashed it whereas on this it doesnt even take a performance hit...

 

Even though it's more or a less moot point - _Vista will use up a lot more memory than XP did on account of the new memory manager and superfetch I/O optimization algorithms MS put in. If you're really bored with sorting your sock-drawer, post, and I'll find the MS whitepapers on it again.

 

i jumped on the gskill 4-4-4-12 $80 4 gigs of ram deal. i'm hoping it will improve supreme commander. later on in the game my fps drop to 15-18 but it's still very playable. i doubt the main ram will do anything but i'm hoping. that game is huge and i'm only on the second level.