memory improvments?

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Jay Smith
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J

John Jay Smith

Vista needs too much ram..... on a P4 1.8Ghz with 512M ram the hard disk
keeps thrashing....

will there be memory improvments in the final product?
 
For a light to normal workload, you'll want a minimum of 512MB. For any
higher than that, you'll want a minimum of a gig of ram. While there may be
improvements to the amount of RAM used, I can't say if 512MB is really ideal
and don't know how much improvements if hardly any will be made to memory
consumption. Like with XP, 128MB is recommended, but I've found it very
frustrating and sometimes rediculous with this RAM - the eMachines I have
took five minutes to start up with that much RAM with XP. The second I
added a 256MB module, that five minutes reduced to 1 or 2. As a guideline,
I'd recommend going at least double what Microsoft recommends. Since
they're recommending for a typical workload 512MB (256MB as a very bare
minimum and may not always be successful just as XP is with 64MB), go with
1GB. My computer's got 768MB of RAM, but I'll be adding a gig module this
summer, bringing me up to 1.75GB of RAM - that should definitely avoid
having HD accessing problems and plenty of room to spare. I've got a 250MHz
Cyrix Compaq running XP. (Believe it or not, not any slower than Windows 98
even with the Luna.) It's got 128MB of RAM (originally 64MB) and with very
few things running and installed, I still only have about 35MB of free RAM
when in idle.
Windows Vista (my guidelines)
256MB RAM - very bare minimum; not guaranteed to work on all systems and
definitely some features are/should be disabled
512MB RAM - decent for a light to mid workload
768MB RAM - decent for a mid workload
1GB - optimal for a mid workload to fairly high workload
1.5GB - optimal for fairly high workloads
2GB - optimal for any workload unless you're crazy

Windows XP (my guidelines)
64MB RAM - very bare minimum; some features should be/are disabled
128MB RAM - decent for a light workload
192MB RAM - decent for a light to medium workload
256MB RAM - optimal for a medium workload
512MB RAM - optimal for a medium to high workload
768MB RAM - optimal for most of any workloads
1GB RAM - optimal for any workload unless you're crazy
 
The processor would probably work okay with Vista, but it probably would
fall under "category 1", the lowest category. I believe a P4 2GHz would be
"category 2". (5 categories.) My AMD Athlon XP 2400+ would probably also
fall under this category while a 2800+ would probably have a category 3.
(It feels like I'm talking about hurricanes.)
 
Thanks, but the machine I posted about is only a test machine...

my main computer is 2.6 Mhz with 1 Gig, and I will upgrade when vista comes
out.

it is not my machines I am thinking about, but other peoples machines.



--
Kenny - www.ComputerBoom.com
Take a look at my site!
A World Full of Wonders...
If you can imagine it, it is possible.

--
 
I've transcribed and simplified this from the MSDN Library as many people
asked me to re-write it as they didn't get it... hopefully the WinSAT
ratings make sense on this:

WSPR Explained:
www.vistabase.co.uk/welcome.php?subcats/performance/explainingwspr
Numbers behind WSPR:
www.vistabase.co.uk/welcome.php?subcats/performance/performancerating

--
Zack Whittaker
Windows Server 2003 R2 Mentor
» ZackNET Enterprises: www.zacknet.co.uk
» MSBlog on ResDev: www.msblog.org
» Vista Knowledge Base: www.vistabase.co.uk
» This mailing is provided "as is" with no warranties, and confers no
rights. All opinions expressed are those of myself unless stated so, and not
of my employer, best friend, Ghandi, my mother or my cat. Glad we cleared
that up!


--- Original message follows ---
 
The only thing I don't like about the performance rating is the fact that it
rates your computer! "Your computer's slow, so I'll give you a two or your
computer's fast, so I'll give you a five." I guess I just don't want to
admit that my computer's getting old... ; ) (Fully aware that my computer
will probably get a 2 - maybe a 3 if I'm really lucky.)
 
Was told at MS Vista show that you can use USB drive for system memory,
so if you buy a thumb drive with a lot of memory, you can walk up to a
pc - stick it in the USB port and you can configure it so that it's like
adding Memory to the inside of the box.
 
usb flash memories die after too many read or writes..
Im not sticking my 1 Gb mp3 player in there!
 
By the time your 1 Gb of memory wears out, you will be able to replace it
very cheaply. As you may have noticed how ram (in its various forms) has
gotten cheaper over the years.
 
Yes....I know, this was partially information, partially humour. But still
not my mp3 player.. lol
I am sure that the speed will be far slower than the bandwidth normal ram
has...

Getting a usb stick is easier to sacrifice... :-)


Question: Windows XP pro 32 bit has a limitation of 4 gb ram due to its 32
bit architecture presumably. Will vista 32 bit still have the same
limitation. I would imagine that this is the case
since it will be 32 bit also....

I think that everyone will shift to 64 bit then... and getting a new pc 64
bit would be a smart move...

My only problem would be driver compatibility...

any thoughts?
 
....(musing out loud)... Not so sure there's really any "improvement" here. I
would imaging that flash card would be used more like a paging file than
actual RAM. After all, unlike RAM flash memory is persisted storage. Seems
it would be better, faster, cheaper to just throw in another RAM chip if
there's room on the board. But I'm just guessing here.
 
Many laptops have limited slots for increasing the ram. My main laptop has
its maximum physical ram of 192 MBytes. I could probably squeeze out some
better performance just by sticking in a USB memory key. Another laptop I
have has a spare slot for adding memory, but since I already have a 1GB
memory key, why not just stick that in there.
My Desktop has 2GBytes and no slots left to add more. So this is an cheap
way to gain some performance with a USB memory key if pre-fetch works as
well as I hope it might. I rarely use up my 2GB of memory, only when I have
3 Virtual PCs running do I begin to run low on memory.

64 bit Vista, or Windows XP 64 bit also gets you better performance just
because 64 bit calculations can be carried out by 64 bit instructions built
into the CPU. Of course the application has to have some 64 bit code to gain
from this.

Wasn't there driver problems when we moved from Windows 98 to Windows XP ?
 
From what I understand the benefits to be is that you can have pre loaded
components of the software you use the most (something called prefetch). So
you don't have to wait for reading from the hard drive as well as those
situations when your system seems to slow down and it seems better to reboot
the computer to get back your performance.
So the information can be carried over from one session to the next, unlike
when you turn off your computer and all the "prefetch" information is lost.
With the USB memory key you don't lose this information.
 
Yeah, that makes more sense than trying to use it as RAM. And I hadn't
thought about the laptop memory issue.
 
Also, you can use an external usb hard drive in the same way to improve
system performance. I have tried it and it does help but only a wee bit. I
guess some is better than none.

Regards
 
Primarily I thought it was for ... you're using someone else's PC and
they only have say 256/512 mb. Rather than open the box to add memory,
you just pop in the usb memory stick and bingo you've got a lot more
memory and no screwdriver needed. Done using that spare PC - remove the
usb stick and back to your desk.
 
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