The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Well, in terms of practically usable RAM, the usual conversion is to add 500 MB from what's usable in Vista to get what's usable in XP. So if you had 4 GB in Vista, you'd have the same amount of usable RAM as you would if you had 3.5 GB installed with XP. Of course that's assuming 64-bit XP and Vista - otherwise it's moot point for Vista and quite possibly on XP (32-bit may be able to use 3.5 GB, but usually it's a bit less).
Having 3.5 GB on XP myself, it's certainly enough for gaming and media and what image editing I've done (that was actually back when I had 2 GB and it was fine). The only times I've ever used all or nearly all of the 3.5 GB is when I had 2 virtual machines open at once as well as several Windows proggies. So for gaming/media/image editing, you ought to be fine with 4 GB and Vista - even when I had 2 GB XP (2.5 Vista) the only time I ever used it all gaming was Company of Heroes on medium-large maps.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
