
As applications and usage models got more demanding, and as memory prices dropped, the move to 2GB made sense. For the longest time, 1GB was sufficient for most enthusiasts under XP. It's the above-1GB range that really has most of us concerned. Even our budget Buyer's Guides have recommended at least 1GB of RAM for over a year, and Vista pretty much makes that a requirement. Once again, we're not telling you anything you haven't heard before, except that 1GB should really be the minimum for any Vista machine and not just those that are Premium certified. Searches appear quicker, applications launch and close faster, and using the OS is just so much better. The experience completely changes with 1GB the improvement is tremendous. Windows XP is more tolerable with 512MB, but we would make a very similar characterization about the overall experience on a system with such little memory. Most of us really don't like using Windows XP on a system with only 512MB, and needless to say Windows Vista turns that dislike into outright hatred. This process took around 2 seconds if we had 2GB in the system, but it took over 12 seconds if we only had 512MB. In one of our test scenarios we had four applications open and attempted to close one of them.

You can get by running a single application, such as IE7 or Outlook, but multitasking is out of the question. Although Vista will do its best to disable background tasks and neat effects to make using your computer less painful with 512MB, we simply wouldn't recommend it.
#Vista memory clean software#
Microsoft and software makers in general are notoriously bad about understating minimum system requirements, so when you see that the bare minimum requirements for Windows Vista list a system with 512MB of memory, you should know right off the bat that this isn't going to be a pleasant experience.

All of these items require memory, and thus when you boot up a Vista machine with 512MB of memory, almost all of it is already being used.
#Vista memory clean code#
There are far more background tasks to take care of, a much more complex UI, and a code base that's significantly larger than that of Windows XP. You've undoubtedly been hearing that Vista's memory requirements will be greater than those of XP, but how much greater are they in practice and why?įirst and foremost, Vista's memory requirements are higher than XP's simply because there is much more to Vista than XP. It's a stressful business, but these days the memory makers are quite excited about Vista and after using the OS for a while now we can understand why. Meeting with memory makers has been fun these past several months - they're all so happy.
