Vista and memory

[madrat]

Running XP with 256mb or less of ram is painfully slow, Would I be rite in thinking that Vista with 512mb or less would be just as painfully slow?

[Analoguesat]

if you want all the vista whistles and bells turned on then 1 gig is the absolute minimum you should be thinking of, and probably 2 gig is the realistic minimum

Remembering that microsoft's minimum reccomended specs are basically lies. The minimum spec for win95 was 4mb (!) I tried it once - the machine started up - eventually, but you couldnt do anything with it - it crashed as soon as you tried to do ANYTHING apart from look at the front end....

[kerrywez]

Very true, if you don't want to end in tears then 2Gig is the best option. I have a Sony Viao with 2gigs ram and it is very good, but I would not like to have any less memory as I feel it would be very detrimental to your speed.

Very best regards Wez

[madrat]

Hmm well after reading some reviews and looking at what you need just for it to run I really don't like the sound of vista at all. Reminds me of when XP first came out and people were loading it on to older PC's made to run windows 98 I was thinking of getting a laptop, but I would rather get a used one with XP. Or an even older one with ME than waist £300+ on one with Vista.

[kerrywez]

If that is your decision madrat, it would be a good one. Vista, though it is getting better, is very short of drivers for a load of stuff that you would use on XP. It is not the be all and end all that is was supposed to be.

I have to use my Toshiba with XP to use dreamup, because neither of my laptops have a serial port, so I have to use a USB to serial converter, but the drivers are no good for Vista.

I would say that you would get a very good Laptop for the money you would spend on Vista, plus if you want to run it you would need a machine with loads of memory.

Have a look on flebay there are always a good fiew on there, I got my Toshiba from there and it has never let me down, it has 1,800, whatever the right size is, of ram and runs XP like a dream.

Good luck with your hunt. Just thought that you would be out a fortune buying a laptop with the memory to run Vista and then the cost of Vista on top of that.

Very best regards Wez

[brian]

I just bought an XP PC from Dell - won't touch Vista because of the drivers problems commonly reported.

Dell do sell Vista machines with 1GB of RAM, but as above, you really want to aim for at least 2GB if possible when running Vista.

Of course, Microsoft ensured they ran their demo machines on 4GB.

[Analoguesat]

I cant understand how Microsoft managed to throw away so much of the built in compatibility between XP & Vista. Very careless of their designers.

[Jimdefruit]

Vista won't even attempt to install if you have less than 512 MB of ram. You will just get a message to say you need more ram.