2Gb's enough for Vista?

[Ken Blake, MVP]

2 x 2048 = 4 gigs of which 90% is useless on a 32 bit machine.

90% of 4GB is 3.6GB.

You think that 3.6GB out of 4GB is useless on a 32GB machine?

Nonsense.

If you have 4GB, approximately .9GB (depending on your hardware
configuration), or about 22.5%, can't be used because your hardware
takes up some of the address space. 22.5% is a long way from 90%.

 

[thetruthhurts]

Frank, see below

I own a Vista and XP machine, both with 2gigs of RAM.
XP is much faster for what I do. That's all I can say.
-Pete

 

[sed]

Vista takes a lot of memory. I suspect at 2GB you may find Vista spending
time thrashing, that is, writing memory pages out to disk as physical memory
is exhausted. A simple way to see is look at Task Manager and see how much
time is System taking. It is the highest priority process and when the
system is memory starved it spends a lot of time trying to manage what is
has available. Also, look at the Page File Usage and Physical Memory
Available.

My 32-bit Vista Home took about 1.5GB with minimal processes.

If these measures show memory is being used simply upgrade your memory, I
would go to 4GB.

 

[Chris Game]

Vista takes a lot of memory. I suspect at 2GB you may find Vista
spending time thrashing, that is, writing memory pages out to
disk as physical memory is exhausted.

Something wrong with your system.