How much slower will the business edition of vista run with 1 gig vs 2
gigs ram. Will it be like running XP with 128mb vs 370mb, xp was
usuable with 128mb but works better with 370. I figure 1gig should be
plenty if not then I might opt for my new notebook to have xp.
Thanks,
Pete
Well, 1GB of RAM is plenty for me running the business version of
Vista and I really push things almost always having 5-7 applications
all running at once, usually a high end video editor that taxes any
CPU and no problems at all here.
Vista isn't sluggish at all, actually quite speedy. Don't
automatically buy into the old "your need more RAM" arguments. While
more RAM never hurts, you probably don't need it.
If you go to Task Manager it shows you what Windows is doing and how
much system resources are currently in use like load on CPU and memory
and it gets updated in real time in little graphics.
The secret?
No secret really, just avoiding a bottleneck. It isn't as much how
much memory you have, rather how fast the CPU can transfer memory
pages back and forth, among other things. That depends on both the
CPU's relative speed, chipset and design AND also very important on
the FSB (Front Side Bus) which is the path the CPU and RAM use to
communicate. The faster the bus speed the less of a bottleneck, which
can slow things to a crawl. Many older PC's can't even get up to 800
FSB.
Today most newer motherboards allow simple easy to change overclocking
options. Thank the gamers for that. There used to be a time when MB
vendors frowned on overclocking and chip makers even took steps to
make it hard to overclock chips. Not any more. If your PC is two years
old or less easy to overclock most motherboards directly from BIOS,
but may not apply to prebuild boxes, like from Dell or Gateway. They
cut corners wherever they can.
Download a copy of CPU-Z and run it. It is free and gives you a
snapshot of how your CPU and memory is performing, your front size bus
speed, memory timing, etc..
Just for sake of illustration:
On this PC I have an Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 that's rated as a 2.13 GHz.
I overclocked it a modest amount.
According to CPU-Z right now it is overclocked to 2.304 GHz with a
modest multiper of 8 so the Bus Speed is 288. The FSB is running at a
modest 1,152 MHz due to overclocking. By default my MB has a max FSB
of 1,066 MHz.
By increasing the multiper and also bumping up the voltage a tad and
fooling around with memory timing I could overclock a good deal more.
