Is Vista a resource hog ?

Say I want to make my laptop as fast as possiblw with minimal resources.
I turn off eye-candy.

Is it still a resource hog ? How much more resources does it require than XP ?
Is it fast on a banias 1.5Ghz with 512 MB of ram ?

 

Bare minimum is 1 gig of ram. I know a girl who has vista basic on 512mb of ram and it barely works. Even with classic look and all options turned down it thrashes the HD something awful due to lack of ram.

 

no you want 1gb of ram.

 

yes, I think you need more ram also..

1gb is min as said, 2gb works fine

3gb is better :

 

I guess Vista is slower than DOS so it is a resource hog. I find most of my bottlenecks come from other pieces of software though.

 

min for Vista is 1gb, recommended is 2gb of RAM.

According to task manager, during normal time my laptop's using 1,1-1,2gb of RAM from 2gb. I'm using Vista Business.

 

YES

Vista is a hog.

 

While the minimum is stated as 1 gig, that is ridiculous. No one should attempt to run Vista with less than 2 gig. Anything less and the users is not going to be at all happy with the feel or response.

Gary

 

If a Fat man sits on Weak chair...it will break.. who's fault? thats Vista.
For weak config. Vista is a hog. For a powerful system ..its a Lamborghini (not exactly...but get the metaphor).

On 512MB RAM, it wont even let u do Surfing. The lowest average memory usage i have brought down to is 600MB ...

So u see, your HD will get bashed up.

If u want performance on that config, then use XP SP2.

 

personally, even with 2 GB of ram, I would still use xp sp2. its lighter on the resources and consequently a lot snappier.

 

Vista ran just fine for me on 1 GB RAM, and upgrading to two GB didn't make much of a difference. 512 is probably a bad idea, however.

 

Do you know one thing the basic RAM available with new PC's these days is 2 GB. What world are you in?

You cannot make vista/ any laptop fast with bare minimum resources.

 

Vista may be sluggish even on 2 Gb sometimes. I would strongly advise anyone with Vista to get at least 2 Gb.

 

And i would strongly advice those with XP SP2 already installed to Create Recovery discs..

U will feel uncomfortable with Vista at first & frustrated too

 

I use 2GB of RAM with Vista Business 64-bit and it seems like the OS is begging for more RAM. I will be upgrading to 4GB soon.

 

The more ram the better. Ram is cheap so why not max out?

When I had 2GB installed my typical standby ram usage was around 600MB, now with 4GB installed Vista uses 1300MB. Unused ram is wasted ram. Vista will adjust to how much ram you have installed, though people tend to think using 1300MB of ram usage is "bloated," I am glad to see the higher number. That means my system is nice and snappy (Accessing ram is faster than a HDD), not the other way around.

 

I think you would have problems with less than 1gig ram. I have 2 gigs and I've actually never seen the computer use more than 1 gig. Out of the box I found vista to be sluggish but I also have an H.P. (i.e. lots of crapware) After following several popular tweak guides I would never go back to XP (though i guess i have to use it at work). Vista has really grown on me...visually appealing, search function, very responsive, boots fast, actually I can't think of one feature or performance attribute that XP has that I miss . Also much of what people report as Vista being a "resource hog" is due to Vista's philosophy that unused Ram is wasted Ram. It tries to load commonly/regularly used resources into memory.

 

i think thats true "Unused ram is wasted ram" but having more than enough means that things will go much smoother.

2Gb is really enough and 1gb is the minimum max is 4gb but u dont need that much. with 2gb i do photoshop,illustrator, wmp, word, firefox, all at once and zero hiccups. (firefox and photoshop are ram hogs)

 

I'm running Vista x64 with 4GB of RAM, and Vista is using 1.3GB, with 3113MB cached and 14MB free. Just goes to show that the OS can use as much RAM as you can give it.

 

My dad has 1GB of RAM and my single core desktop has 1.5GB. 1GB + dual core > 1.5GB + single core.

1GB is enough for surfing and word processing.

 

Linux also follows the philosophy of used ram being wasted ram, but what ifthe ram isnt there ? Or some other process wants it ? Why cant Vista play nice and survive on smaller ram ? If there is free ram, then it should go ahead, goble up 2GB; but if ram is limited, adjust usage accordingly.

 

If you don't like Vista, don't use it. It does play nice though and survive on smaller RAM. I've installed it on a headless 512 RAM machine and it runs just fine. Sure you can't play COD4 on it, but it RUNS and you can remote manage it just fine.

 

I'm running vista on a 6 year old desktop with a P4 2.5GHz and 2 GB of DDR Ram. It runs fine, even with aero and all the pretty stuff on

 

Does it hog CPU ? Will it run fine on a pentium M downclocked to 600Mhz with 2GB of ram ?

 

The system can drop to ~400MB.

 

I used to have Vista on my Sager, which has 2GB of RAM and a 1.86GHz Pentium M. It was a dog for the most part. I'd recommend not putting Vista on anything less than a dual-core, 2GB RAM system.

 

No. But running vista in a CPU < 1 GHz is not recommended.

 

What makes you think that this isn't what it does? It does exactly as you describe.

Gary

 

Why would you WANT to?

Gary

 

1.Cuz you can undervolt the pentium M's, with lower the voltage lower the speed.
This lower voltage means lower temps, and this means fans barely come on.

2.So that I know OS isnt stealing a significant number of CPU cyclesfrom other apps that might need it; so that older hardware is pushed as much as it can be.

Cuz people are saying 1GB ram is minimum.
I can run linuz with 128-256MB of ram. I was using full fledged linux with 3-d desktop etc for a year on 512MB of ram. XP runs well on 512MB of ram.

 

Same here. My sister's computer functions just fine on 1GB RAM. She really only has problems with myspace.

 

Vista is not a resource hog at all, it caches your most used programs so they start up faster and if you start up a "big" program that requires a lot of resources vista will release some of the resources for that program.