4 GB May Be Vista's RAM Sweet Spot

jcatcw writes "David Short, an IBM consultant who works in the Global Services Division and has been beta testing Vista for two years, says users should consider 4GB of RAM if they really want optimum Vista performance. With Vista's minimum requirement of 512MB of RAM, Vista will deliver performance that's 'sub-XP,' he says. (Dell and others recommend 2GB.) One reason: SuperFetch, which fetches applications and data, and feeds them into RAM to make them accessible more quickly. More RAM means more caching."

Turn SuperFetch off

"More RAM means more caching."

Well, Duh...

Remember the $40/Meg RAM days?

More RAM

means more CASHing!

Re:More RAM

Had a friend who tried to buy a Dell box today. They wouldn't sell it to him with XP on it; only Vista. I can only imagine what kind of deals Dell and MSFT have cut...

Re:More RAM

Microsoft: "Hey dell"
Dell: "What?"
Microsoft: "Want some of this?"
*Microsoft waves a bunch of cash in dells face*
Dell: "Yes please :D"

You can Imagine the rest...

Re:More RAM

Had a friend who tried to buy a Dell box today. They wouldn't sell it to him with XP on it; only Vista.

Does the friend know that "business" Dell PCs (e.g. Optiplex desktops, Latitude notebooks, Precision workstations) can be configured with XP? Only the "home" PCs (e.g. Dimension desktops, Inspiron notebooks) are restricted to Vista only. (Dimensions and Inspirons are also sold in the "business" section, but they are really meant for home users.)

I can only imagine what kind of deals Dell and MSFT have cut...

I think it's reasonable to believe that phasing out XP support might be worth the relatively few sales they lose by not offering XP to home users. Maybe my imagination should be more cynical.

Re:Turn SuperFetch off

"More RAM means more caching."
Well, Duh...

You say it's obvious; but it's amazing how many Slashdot posts I've seen which consist of "I've got XGB of RAM [where X>1] and Vista's using up 75% of it running the OS alone; therefore Vista must need XGB of RAM to even run, never mind applications!" -- conveniently ignoring that Vista's just using the extra RAM to cache frequently used apps, documents, etc., and it'll automatically be freed up if any application requests it...

Re:Turn SuperFetch off

What I think is needed is a way to see what ram is used by superfetch and maybe even for what. If it's freed up immediately when another application requests it, then it's really shouldn't be considered used in the scheme of things. Sure the ram space is filled but its not used at that moment. I also am surprised by how many people are fooled by this and are jumping to a conclusion that Vista needs absurd memory to run. I read less to tech stories these days and focus more on the comments where people break the real info.

Re:Turn SuperFetch off

What I think is needed is a way to see what ram is used by superfetch and maybe even for what.

Vista: RAM is very important to your system. Are you sure you want to look at your RAM?

You: OK

Vista: Are you sure? Anything you do might cause your computer to perform poorly. Are you sure?

You: OK

Vista: Really? Cause I don't think you'd even know what to look for. Are you sure?

You: OK

Vista: Really?

You: OK

etc. . .

Re:Turn SuperFetch off

Translated for teh interwebs:

Vista: O rly?

You: Ya rly!

Dealing with Vista

Am I the only one reminded of the Infocom game Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy whenever someone describes their experience with Vista?

Corridor, Aft End
This is one end of a short corridor that continues fore along the main deck of the Heart of Gold. Doorways lead to aft and port. In addition, a gangway leads downward.

>go south
That entrance leads to the Infinite Improbability Drive chamber. It's supposed to be a terribly dangerous area of the ship. Are you sure you want to go in there?

>go south
Absolutely sure?

>go south
I can tell you don't want to really. You stride away with a spring in your step, wisely leaving the Drive Chamber safely behind you. Telegrams arrive from well-wishers in all corners of the Galaxy congratulating you on your prudence and wisdom, cheering you up immensely.

>go south
What? You're joking, of course. Can I ask you to reconsider?

>go south
Engine Room
You're in the Infinite Improbability Drive chamber. Nothing happens; there is nothing to see.

>look
I mean it! There's nothing to see here!

>look
Okay, okay, there are a FEW things to see here...


(the above with all due respect to Douglas Adams, Steve Meretzky, and Infocom)

Vista as Martin the depressive robot

Your post makes me wonder whether Microsoft might eventually add various personalities to the Vista warnings.
Eg, as Martin the depressive robot :

OS : You are about to visit a web page. It sounds like fun, but I'm just stuck being a boring OS assistant. Do you really want to go there?
You : Yes
OS : Figures, I'll never have even a fraction of the fun you're having using this computer. That page wants to run a flash application. Are you sure you want to go to that web page?
You : yes, dammit
OS : You are annoyed at me, I'm just a dumb lowly Operating System security warning system. You probably don't even care about me at all. Do you want me to stop nagging you?
You : YES, PLEASE shut the hell up
OS : Oh, that's great, I've been programmed with state of the art security warning information, and you just don't want to appreciate my pathetic self. Are you sure you really want to turn me off?
You : YES, go away and never come back.
OS : Fine, I'll just sit here in my own misery, and hope that you turn me back on one day, which you probably won't.

Re:Turn SuperFetch off

Yeah for low end websurfing use. Me I'm sitting here looking at it going "HOLY SHIT!" as I do video editing and that means I need to bump ram up to 8Gig or higher because the OS is such a pig.

If I need 4Gig as the OS's sweet spot and I also need 4 gig for my editor app sweet spot, I start looking at different platforms.

Problem is that these finding that "sweet spot" are not telling the full story. What apps are they running? if they are simply using low impact apps like office and IE/firefox and a few games then it's hands down the OS is being a ram pig and is incredibly unacceptable to those of us that use ram intensive applications.

Reinforces my decision that the next upgrade I take is to the Mac.. Until then I need to find a NLE that will be happy in XP for a few years.

Re:Turn SuperFetch off

I remember the $40/MB RAM!

OS/2 reccomended 4MB
Vista? 4GB

Too bad we aren't doing exponetially better things with these boxes...

Re:Turn SuperFetch off

I remember the $40/MB RAM!

$100,000 for 16K? Teehee, and you had to build a new wing for it.

speed, speed and more speed - but where is it?

Some time back (ok, 1979) I built a system to monitor a Dutch nuclear reactor. It monitored temperatures, rod positions, and so on. Nothing important (cough). There was no suggestion of keeping costs down to save money (and I'm glad).

The system had two colour graphic displays, a printer or two, and 4 operator terminals. It ran a real time, multi tasking operating system (called RSX11).

The main system had 128kb of memory. Yes, 128kb.

Today my dev machine has 2Gb of memory and the 3Ghz processor must - surely - be some thousands of times as fast.
So I have 15,000 times as much memory, a processor perhaps 3,000 times as fast (I'm guessing, as figures are hard to pin down). That sounds like 445 million times as much power to me.

And what do we do with all this grunt? Well damn, solitare looks good these days.

So, were the old programmers really, really good? [We were, we were ...]
Are the new ones really, really bad? [hang on, I'm still at it ...]
Have we stopped caring about size and performance of programs?

I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't.
I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well. Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.

And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.

Re:speed, speed and more speed - but where is it?

In industry almost everybody uses loops instead of recursion unless there's a really good reason to use recursion (e.g. tree traversal). More because of readability than efficiency; in principle your optimizer should be able to convert tail recursion to iteration anyway (though whether this will actually happen or not does depend on the specific language and implementation). Academics just love recursion because it maps neatly to mathematical induction and hence makes algorithm correctness more easily provable.

The reason "bloat" happens is more because programming teams have deadlines and if there's a choice between a new feature, a bugfix or some not-strictly-necessary optimization (and there's always a choice), the optimization's never going to get done. It's just good business sense; sure everybody complains about slowness, but if application A is mean-and-lean and application B is bloated but has a feature you need to do your job, you'll whine and cavil and buy B anyway.

Re:speed, speed and more speed - but where is it?

Sounds like you havn't used anything between 1979 and 2000s. I can clearly remember my commdore64 taking 10 minutes to load up an app I had written, about the same time for windows 95 to boot up on a 486.

The average consumer has seen mass improvement. Today I can simultaneously rip a DVD, listen to MP3s, browse the internet, and play a game with a core 2 duo. I was lucky to get 1 of these working at a time back in win95 days. It takes less than a second to load most apps (well, pretty much anything but adobe).

I agree that we have stopped caring about size/performance because in most cases it doesn't matter.

But take a look at *cost*

Have we stopped caring about size and performance of programs?

No. But our limits of acceptability have changed. As processing power has gotten cheaper, developers (myself included) have focused more on getting features out to market faster, rather than application performance.

I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't.

That's always been correct. We care more about how many features are available at what cost, so long as performance isn't noticably bad on commodity hardware.

Do you remember when c was considered a "high level language"? What about the debates on how slow programs written in c were? I do. Times have changed....

I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well.

I don't know about that. Perhaps you don't remember loading DOS programs like PC-Write on an 8086 processer with 512K RAM? That was my word processor of choice, and it got slower the longer your document was. By the time you passed 100k, it was a dog.

Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.

I sure do. I also remember the care with with I never hit the two space bars together in a graphics program. (That would universally crash my computer). It shared TEXT ok, but anything graphical was another mess entirely.

And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.

If you don't mind me asking, what would you RATHER be writing?

Re:Turn SuperFetch off

OS/2 reccomended 4MB

Not to be picky, but OS/2 (even assuming 2.0, since it was the first 16/32bit release) REQUIRED 4MB of RAM, but didn't run well unless you 12MB of RAM, although I do know some people that got by with 8MB of RAM, I also even know peeps that ran NT 3.1 with 8MB of RAM as well, even though it was just as painful to watch.

So bascially people are here making fun of Vista for wanting 512MB, and running 'much' faster than XP when configured with > 512MB...

Last I checked OSX even wants 512MB and 1GB of RAM for acceptable performance if you run a lot of concurrent apps since the windows are double buffered in system RAM for the composer.

Also any *nix distribution with XWindows and a Windows Manager like KDE running, easly scale to where 512MB and 1GB are a sweet spot as well.

Since this is the year 2007, I don't see Vista being far out of the ballpark, except for the fact it has some really smart caching technology that allows it to better use > 1GB of RAM via its Superfetch caching technology in ways other OSes don't unless they have the application load demanding it.

Which is the point most everyone seems to keep missing in this post. They are in a fuss because Vista continues to get faster and faster as more RAM is added.

Most OSes 'desktop performance' top out at 1-2GB of RAM and don't use the extra RAM for anything but dumb/lazy caching.

So instead of making fun of Vista for actually taking advantage of this extra 'free' RAM and scaling it in a way that 'continues' to add performance even when applications don't need it, maybe we should focus our efforts in the OSS community to work on caching technology so all OSS OSes will scale RAM as well as Vista.

(PS, Even though I'm responding to your OS/2 numbers, this post is meant more of a general response to everyone in here, so nothing personal to you, the OS/2 numbers were just a fun place to jump in :) .)

Re:THis is obscene!

Turn off aero. Turn on "Windows Classic" desktop theme. You're good to go with 1GB of memory. Microsoft could tell you the same thing, but then the best features that they offer in this bloated release won't even be used (and it is these features MS is stressing based on print ads and commercials).

MS knows shineys sell software to Joe Sixpack, so they don't mind the extra memory it takes to run them all the time. However, I'd don't think vista needs 4 gigs of memory to run snappy with all the goodies turned off.

Re:THis is obscene!

Turn off aero. Turn on "Windows Classic" desktop theme. You're good to go with 1GB of memory. Microsoft could tell you the same thing, but then the best features that they offer in this bloated release won't even be used (and it is these features MS is stressing based on print ads and commercials).

But if you turn off Aero and all that stuff, why bother upgrading in the first place?

So that you can see the Black Screen of Are You Sure You Want To Run That Program?

Re:THis is obscene!

Turn off aero. Turn on "Windows Classic" desktop theme. You're good to go with 1GB of memory. Microsoft could tell you the same thing, but then the best features that they offer in this bloated release won't even be used (and it is these features MS is stressing based on print ads and commercials).


Even with 1GB you are good with AERO, as Vista only uses a fraction of system RAM for the AERO effects, since it intelligently co-shares system and video RAM.

For example, Aero is consuming only 12Mb of system RAM on the computer I am typing this on at the moment. I also have an animated wallpaper (video) and this window is partially transparent so I can see my applications behind it.

Vista does NOT double buffer like OSX, so there is not this massive overhead for RAM by using the AERO interface like there is in OSX to get tear free applicaiton drawing.

People forget that turning off Aero and effectively the DWM, reduces ALL application performance on Vista.

This is because it disables the acceleration drawing in hardware at the GDI/WPF level, and also pushes application redrawing back to the applications like WindowsXP.

So you not only get a worse 'visual' experience with it off, as you get tearing and extra redrawing with the composer turned off, you also get a massive performance reduction as this tearing and redrawing forces the application to consume CPU cycles to redraw when you do anything, just as Windows XP did.

When you turn off Aero you lose the composer and some of the 3D GPU acceleration of Vector and Bitmap drawing functions of the core graphics subsystem that assist the appliation in drawing the interface before it even gets to the composer.

And even though Vista gets the 'effect' of double buffering Window textures, it doesn't technically double buffer them, so the RAM overhead to do all this is quite minimal as the GPU RAM is used instead of both System and GPU RAM being used as in OSX.

See Vista's driver model gives it some cool tricks, and this is just one side effect. And since the driver model allows Vista to draw directly to the screen from GPU or System RAM without having to shove the System RAM image into the GPU before drawing like OSX does, you don't have to double store images in the composer.

So Vista can use system or GPU RAM intelligently and draw directly to the screen from either memory pool. Which is also why AGP and PCI/e are needed for the Aero interface in Vista.

So even with 1GB of RAM, don't be so quick to turn off Aero.

In fact several 3D games run faster with Aero enabled,(even on 1GB systems) because if you only have 128MB of Video RAM, and the game wants more for textures, Vista will intelligently use free System RAM to hold the less performance intensive textures. And since the application via the Vista WDDM sees the GPU and Vista allocated System RAM for textures as the same it can draw or use them directly as if your Video card had 512mb of GPU RAM instead of 128MB.

So if your video card lacks the GPU RAM for the 'high quality' textures in your game, leave Aero on and you can shove the texture quality in the game up beyond what your card would normally be capable of handling.

Also with respect to how the OpenGL driver is made by ATI or NVidia, Vista can even do this for OpenGL applications as well.

Good luck and don't be so quick to turn off Aero, you might be surprised how much performance it adds to the system, even with 1GB of RAM.

(Our techs even leave it enabld on 512mb systems as it still gives more of a performance boost than the 8-20mb of RAM it consumes on average.)

Re:THis is obscene!

My XP box runs fine with less than 1G and runs pretty well with 1G. It is hard to see how 3G can be gobbled up by some eye candy and other "UI innovations". That an OS needs that much memory is plain crazy.

I'm tired of saying this, but read the article -- or even just the summary. The guy is not talking about how much memory the OS needs just to fit into. 3G isn't "gobbled up by some eye candy". He's talking about the point at which adding more memory would not make any difference. His equivalent estimate for XP was 2GB; and yet, as you say, it runs find with way less than 1GB. The OS doesn't "need that much memory". It can, however, use any extra memory you do have to preload applications and data.

Loading up all that RAM takes a lot of time and shows poor design.

If you've got XGB of RAM, you may as well *use* it to cache commonly used data etc. and speed up your system, rather than just have it sit there like a lemon. Please tell me how doing this "shows poor design"?

heh heh

4 GB May Be Vista's RAM Sweet Spot

But I'm guessing it's going to be a sticking point for most consumers. At least, the ones without a sugar daddy.

Re:heh heh

But I'm guessing it's going to be a sticking point for most consumers.

What do you mean? I'm getting 8 GB so I'll be ready for SP2!

Re:x64

was gonna say, you toss 4g in a 32bit box you will only see about 3gig. unless you go 64bit, but then you will see even less driver support available

Re:x64

Almost all intel processors, starting with the pentium pro, support PAE, which allows up to 64Gb of RAM. This was supported only by the Advanced and Datacenter server editions of Win2k, and by the enterprise version of Win2k3. Unix operating systems, however, have very good support for PAE. For a single application to be able to use more that 4Gb of RAM, though, it needs to be properly written to be PAE aware. Without using PAE, the maximum memory available for a single app is 3Gb on Windows.

Re:x64

Sigh - the 4GB is the Process Memory limit. You have been able to run 64+GByte on a Xeon box for years (desktop chipsets tend not to have enough memory slots to go this high). Each process gets its 4GB with either a 2 GB Kernel/2GB user space - or the 1GB Kernel/3GB user space mentioned by the parent.

Since most environments run more than one process, they can take advantage of the extra ram assuming their total amount of allocated space is above 4GB. For that matter, I used to run a 32bit version of BSD 5 years ago that ran on a Dual PIII system with 8GB RAM. Basically we ran 2 caching processes of 4GB each, and some smaller processes that added up to a memory load of 8GB.

What you get with a 64bit operating system is a theoretical 64bit address space for each and every process. In reality different processor architectures offer somewhere between 40 and 48 bits worth of physical address space (Good for almost a Petabyte of RAM). 64bit is really only useful for a few VERY large applications such as Database, a few imaging processing apps, and some massive number crunching... Your average desktop OS application has no need for more than 32 bits, and in fact most of us would actually have slower machines with a 32bit user space

Great idea Microsoft!

1) Cache contents of entire hard disk to RAM
2) Claim performance boost in Vista
3) Profit!

Re:Great idea Microsoft!

It's a good plan. RAM density and processor speed has mostly followed Moore's law in transistor density. While disk storage density has followed suit, the I/O path hasn't followed suit. The typical SATA drive might burst ~70MB/s, but it still sustains ~40MB/s just like good 'old PATA.

All modern OS's load huge executables compared with the good 3M workstation days (1 Megabyte, 1 Megapixel, 1 MIP). Microsoft is doing the right thing by aggressively caching commonly run items. And I note, they're late to the party: 'NIX does this too.

And I say once again (as a NIX professional) that Vista's pretty damn good. Gone are the days when Windows was a toy. No longer. It has plenty of bullshit legacy cruft, but Vista is a BIG improvement.

I disagree

I gotta disagree. I just used Vista last night for the first time on my GF's new laptop with 1 gig RAM, and it was just fine. Even with the souped up interface, it seemed snappy. I was a bit worried from all of this kind of anti-hype hype, but it was just fine. I'd be happy using it with 1 gig RAM. I'd say that it was a smidgen slower than XP would be, but then again, I didn't try turning off the super-slick Apple-esqe "Aero" interface, either (she likes it, I still use Windows Classic on all of my XP boxes).

Re:I disagree

Surprisingly Aero actually has little impact on system performance. It is all of that other crap like DRM running in the background that is causing everything to slow down. Overall Vista is measurably slower than XP and many applications just run like shit right now on Vista. Just running the OS and doing some surfing or email won't show much difference than XP on modern hardware.

All I know is beyond whatever the benchmarks show Explorer is even slower in Vista than it was before. Go out on the network and wait in agony while the little green bar at the top of Explorer chugs along taking forever to finally display files. I'm sure this just the fault of the switches and Windows 2003 R3 servers I've been using though *rolls eyes*. I'm just really disappointed with Vista after all of this wait and at this point the only time I boot into it anymore is to check app compatibility.

Hint - Set VLC to GDI mode so you don't have to see the f'ing jarring screen transition anymore.

Re:I disagree

Heh. And Apple's "super slick" interface runs just fine on my three year old iBook (800Mhz G4, 640mb RAM) and I typically have >15 applications open at a time.

I know this is not a reasonable comparison, as Windows can't open 15 apps at a time
(joke)

Re:I disagree

It is not flamebait It is true. Until recently I was running OS X on a 667 Mhz 1Gb RAM powerbook. which as 4 1/2 years old. And it ran the latest version of OS X quite well. Not quite at the sweet spot but good enough to get most of my work done. Granted my new MacBook Pro outperforms it in every respect, but still it ran well enough no to be annoying.

Bad news for intel here..

If I remember correctly, the sweet spot for xp was 1 gig, meaning people got more bang for their buck upgrading the processor.

If vista scales all the way to 4, then we're looking at a windows market that will be very similar to the mac market, where upgrading the video card and ram will get you more bang for your buck than replacing the processor.

this will mean a slowdown in intel sales (and amd)

Seriously

People do the same things with their computers today as they did 15 (even 20) years ago: play games, print, e-mail, read, write, collect media. While there is an argument to be made that OSD, due to higher resolutions and 3D algorithms, and networking have become more complex there simply is no efficient reason why the size of the codebase and the memory footprint has increased as much as it has.

There is a good reason: people remain employed.

Re:Seriously

Twenty years ago I remember an 80-character email program my school used that required remembering about 40 shortcuts. None of them were displayed. You could work on one email at a time -- that's it. There was no GUI email program with easy to understand menus. There was no way to work on more than one email at a time. You were fortunate if you got copy and paste.

Twenty years ago I remember the "media" I "collected". Amazing 256-color graphic files. Mostly of stupid things like bowls of fruit (porn really wasn't all it was cracked up to be at the time). No pictures of family and friends in high detail. No means of easily storing said photos for extended periods of time.

Twenty years ago I remember when a "state of the art" game was one that wasn't entirely text-based. When an adventure game's inventory had a max of 16 items and enemies were scripted (and therefore dumb as bricks). No photorealistic visuals to draw you in. No fairly natural AI to breathe life to the world. And certainly no way to play with thousands of others at the same time.

My point?

All of these changes have been the result of higher memory, faster processors, etc. Yes, we use a bigger memory footprint nowadays. So what? Isn't broadening the appeal of the PC (families storing photos and grandmothers that can actually work the email program) worth it? Yes, the fundamental operations haven't changed (write email, send email, etc). Big deal. Call that a testament to stellar original design than a foible of modern design.

Fact of the matter is I *can* do more, much more, than I could with my PC from 20 years ago. And I can do it in an easier way (blame Vista/OS X all you want -- they're still better UIs than what we used in '87). That's called "progress", regardless if the memory footprint grows or not (and the fundamental tenants of computing stay largely the same).

Re:Seriously

Of course, unlike 15 years ago...

• people watch and store videos and music on their computer -- sometimes simultaneously. (MIDIs don't count. )
• they use websites that have active content beyond animated "under construction" gifs (flash isn't just for pretty intros anymore -- it's critical to real interfaces and applications);
• they store and expect to quickly search through significantly more data (years and years of email, with attachments);
• the security environment has become much more complex (and that's not all Microsoft's fault);
• people use encryption (SSL and DRM, for example), without even noticing it;
• people run many more applications side-by-side... even if it's just two IM clients and a browser with a stack of open tabs;

And that's just the mythical "average user". Operating systems have to support more than the average user -- they have to support the guy writing apps for the average user (development and debugging have gotten significantly easier); the office of the average user (managing a large userbase); the folks writing content for the average user (both professionals and YouTube).

Many of these things are transparent. And, yeah, I could go back to using pine, bash, rxvt, and WindowMaker (although that's only 10 years ago, not 15), grep through my emails when I needed to find something and use IRC to talk to my friends.

But you know what? This is better. A lot better.

Re:Seriously

> people watch and store videos and music on their computer -- sometimes simultaneously.

Sure, you can watch video with a 800 Mhz, 256 MB, Windows 2000 box. But you can't do all the real-time encryption / decryption operations required for modern DRM systems. So we're SO MUCH better off with today's faster machines and Vista.

Re:Pre-emptive strike!

"640,000 DIMM slots ought to be enough for anyone"

Article in a nutshell...

More RAM == Better!

This message brought to you by: Article in a Nutshell (TM)

He must still be running

Display write and a 3270 emulator.

RAM costs more than a computer?

How much does 4GB of ram cost? I don't know the cheapest places to buy RAM but a quick search put a couple 2GB sticks at $450-500 ($225-250 each).

Before Vista came out you could easily get a low to mid-end XP desktop computer for $500.

Re:4GB? 64bit here we come! Lets just hope *nix wi

They have great 64 bit offerings. You just have to purchase 32 licenses for their 2 bit offerings to get there.

completely not true

On 512MB Vista runs perfectly fine, having automatically turned off the UI bells and whistles and throttled back some of its services. In my experience 1GB is the sweet spot, which is how much I have on my Dev box.

Increased bloat + static OS expectations =

What does Vista do that's really NEW and WANTED in an operating system? Not much. More eye candy? That's worth $300? The customer will decide, but I'll say this:

This much bloat simply isn't necessary. Caching is one thing, but the RAM requirements of Vista simply for code space are massive compared to XP for roughly the same functionality. That's a center that cannot hold.

What we expect from an OS is pretty well-known and well-defined now. This means the innovation will slow and there will be increasing reluctance to upgrade simply for the sake of upgrading, especially when the upgrade is a worse performer than the software being upgraded!

This is fertile ground for optimization.

An example:

Compare the executable size and memory utilisation of uTorrent and Azureus. Azureus represents the old guard of BT clients, you might say. A large, bloated code base in Java, implementing features that you wouldn't think would require that much code. And boy it's a dog, and crawls on any sub-1.5Ghz laptop. Enter uTorrent. I would say Azureus is the Vista to uTorrent's microLinux. For the uninitiated, in terms of program size (exe + libs) and memory utilization, we're talking about 170kB/4MB to 7.6MB/16.3MB, respectively. uTorrent was able to bring just about all the features present in Azureus and compact it into a 170kB .exe. And lo, the damn thing is snappy even on my old P233/64MB laptop.

I think this will be the end of Microsoft. The API expected for a Windows box is known. It's publicized. The time is ripe for a competitor to come in and reimplement it, using less RAM and resources while conforming to the same standards, and for a fraction of the price. If this were to happen, and if the software companies were to realize they didn't have to sit beholden to *Microsoft's* "Windows" anymore, then we'd really see some fur fly in the marketplace.

Vista just makes good use of..

Vista remembers what you run, and when. it loads all this into ram before your going to need it.

The sweet spot for memory will be vista requirements(512mb or so) + space for whatever apps you usualy concurrently run, IE/FF, photoshop, iTunes, whatever, it'll dump those into system ram before you even click their icons, reduce real world loading times significantly.

Despite the MS jokes, an OS that leaves ram unused isnt doing its job properly, it can always free memory , quickly, if needed.

May I have your attention please

Note to *nix users: You want to run *nix? Then shut up and pay for driver/app development.

Note to Mac users: You want to run OS X? Then shut up and pay for the pretty hardware.

Note to Windows users: You want to run Vista? Then shut up and buy the extra memory.

Windows Vista Capable according to Dell

From Dell's website [dell.com] A Windows Capable PC has 512 MB RAM and is "Great for... Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games.

I thought you were joking, but,...

Sure enough, that's exactly what it says. What in the hell use is a computer with just an OS running and nothing else? This is what that call "capable"? Ay Carumba!

      Brett

From a guy who needs 2GB for XP

It's not really an interesting article. To summarize:
          Guy says you need 4GB for sweet spot.
          Same Guy says you need 2GB for XP sweet spot.

I'll give you that nowadays you might want 1GB for XP, but 2GB is excessive for most. I know plenty who are happy with 512MB running OS + AV + Word + Browser. (Although 768MB is better.)

Take Minimum Spec, Multiply by 4. That's more likely to be the minimum usable. (See minimum specs for previous MS operating systems for comparison purposes.)

More ram = More caching = More speed?! OMG!

This just goes back to the old saying that "unused memory is wasted memory."

You should always cache as much as possible.

The problem is, if consumers saw their memory usage at 100% all the time, they would freak out.

I've had 4gb for a while, as I use Photoshop heavily. I'm going to make the vista jump just so that I can run more/all of that 4gb, plus get some 64 bit action.

        -- Dave

4 Gig is recommended....

....if you don't want Vista to run like OSX.

Besides, this will just accelerate the "faster and cheaper every month" rule for hardware. It's a good thing(tm)

XPonential

Let's see, 95's "sweet spot" was what, 32 Mb? Windows '98 was 64, Win2K did well in 256, XP likes 512+ and Vista really wants four gigabytes? Ouch. Of course, when you factor in how much less the cost per bit of memory and hard disk is compared to a decade ago, it's not too incredible ... but still.

Only for 64 bit versions

In the case of the more common 32 bit version of Vista, you'll never get 4 GB of usable memory. The reason is that all the devices in the system need allocatable addresses which can only go as high as 32 bits so they occupy the address space that would otherwise be available for the RAM. Modern graphic cards also swallow a fair bit of address space. The end result is that you'll only get about 3 GB usable memory of the 4 GB physical memory.

If you are using Vista x32, do *not* buy more than 3 GB of memory or you will be just throwing your money away.

Re:Here we go...

anti-Vista crowd

That would be everyone on earth who isn't a Microsoft fan boy or shill. Vista is the upgrade no-one wants.

Re:What?

Genuine question, what functionality would I gain by going to vista and quadrupling my ram?

The satisfaction in knowing that you are no longer using an operating system that directly contributes to the decline of Microsoft's profits?

Re:What?

Genuine question, what functionality would I gain by going to vista and quadrupling my ram?

I don't think there's any Linux distribution that can match Vista when it comes to DRM (digital restriction management). I'm a Linux user as well. Fedora Core 4. Should probably upgrade, but it just works for the most part, so there's not a lot of incentive. Not sure what the advantages are of this DRM stuff, everything I've read about it actually sounds kind of like something I wouldn't want. But if you're into it, it sounds like Vista would be a much better choice than any distribution of Linux. Though Novel has a relationship with Microsoft -- perhaps they'll come out with a DRM rich Linux distro for all the Linux users who want DRM. Personally I'm going to wait and see what the advantages of DRM are before switching.

Translation

Translation:

It's FUD that you need more RAM.

I always need more RAM.

(Yeah, another logical /. post.)