According to this article http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBa you really need 4GB Ram to run Vista. MS claim 512MB should be sufficient, but it probably would only give you the juice to load up Vista with no power to run any applications.
My problem here is that with my recent computer purchase I managed to get a 2GB system together of which I'm pretty proud (£500+ without monitor), and it provides me with amazing / enough performance on my XP system. But is it really already too old!!
It just emphasise the need for supported lower spec operating systems. How long is MS going to maintain XP? Good thing I have a Linux box as well, so I'll be able to manage 😉
Xp is to be supported for another 2 years, and then there will be another 5 years of extended support.
Basically, you'll be seeing Windows Updates coming through for another 7 years – I don't think you have to worry somehow.
I think that guy is talking out of his arse – XPs sweet spot is half of what he says, at least if you're gaming anyway.
While I wouldn't mind 4gb of ram in my laptop, I think that's going to have to wait another year though, and I certainly think 2gb is the best balance between price and performance at the moment.
Min specs for Vista are just like Min specs for any games or applications out there – you can run it, but you might not necessarily enjoy it :p
See that's the thing – I like to enjoy my £500+ investment as much as possible – So it is XP for me until I get more RAM… And MS has come with a few service packs.
I know about MS support cycles, I'm the guy who stopped using a "98 system" the day MS stopped supporting it… Not because I wanted to, and as that system couldn't (sufficiently well) run XP, that's actually how I tried Linux the first time! Well done MS 😀
One good question out of all of this is actually how "expensive" on the system the operating system ought to be!
There is a trade off here, and unfortunately by using a proprietary system (mainly Windows or Mac) there really isn't the same level a choice of leaving out expensive performance options as there is with an open source system.
I think that the 4GB thing is poppycock to be honest, I have 4GB in my machine running Vista, and I run SolidWorks, 3-6 copies of Visual Studio (at 100-300MB each), MSDN, Outlook, and 2 virtual servers with 768MB of RAM and 384MB RAM similtaneously without a single performance problem. If I can do that, you must be able to run a perfectly good system on half the RAM>
Welcome back Phil. Did you have a nice trip?
I think the question here is what is a perfectly good system? Maybe your system is just prooving the point that 4GB is indeed the sweetpoint where everything works perfectly sweet! Have you tried taking out 2 of the gigs, and then test it? That could be an awesome benchmark test case… If you do that, I'd like to be there as a witness 😉
Some of the problems that the article raises are indeed very valid questions. For instance is it bad that dell advertises low spec computer systems as "Vista ready", well knowing that they probably only boot Vista and that's it!!
This is not a pure MS problem, but definately it is a marketing problem of the vendors created because MS sets a very low minimum requirement. A damn mistake that games developers usually do as well to increase sales… Yes, I've bought games in the past that simply didn't work, although my computer were way above the min req spec!
The trip was awesome thanks, I had a really good time and met some great people.
Before I recently upgraded I did indeed run this machine on 2GB and it ran fine, the only reason I upped the ante was because of the amount of work I do with Virtual Machines – and I wanted to up their performance.
If you are doing the sort of work I do with the same type of memory intensive apps, then 4GB is the sweetspot, but Vista has little to do with it.
That aside, I would not run Vista with less than 2GB, at 2GB it is a lovely system which you can chuck an awful lot at, but less than that and the performance (in my experience) drops exponentially.
As for the Vista Ready thing – this is a topic in and of itself, and there is plenty of blame to go around.