how much RAM for Vista

[George Lin]

Hi there

How much RAM capacity for Vista can provide best PC performance? 2GB? 4GB?

Thanks.

George Lin

 

[Titus Pullo]

Hi there

How much RAM capacity for Vista can provide best PC performance? 2GB? 4GB?

Thanks.

George Lin

I have 3GB and Vista Business x64 runs great. Very fast and stable.

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

The truth really is that Vista really loves RAM, so the more you give it the
better. But if you are on a budget and want the best recommended amount of
RAM for the OS, its usually 1 to 2 GBs of RAM.

Vista x86 supports 3 to 4 GBs of RAM depending on the motherboard
Vista x64 supports up to 128 GBs of RAM.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Hi there

How much RAM capacity for Vista can provide best PC performance? 2GB? 4GB?

This is *not* a one-size-fits-all situation. You get good performance
if the amount of RAM you have keeps you from using the page file, and
that depends on what apps you run and how large are the files you open
with them.

That said, for 32-bit Vista, almost everyone needs at least 1GB for
decent performance, and only someone running particularly
memory-hungry program could make effective use of more than 2GB. So
the answer to your question for *most* people (again, *not* everybody)
is somewhere between 1 and 2GB.

Also note that with 32-bit Vista, even if you installed 4GB, you
wouldn't be ale to use more than about 3.1GB of it. That's because all
32-bit versions of Windows (XP as well as Vista), even though they
have a 4GB address space, can only use *around* 3.1GB of RAM. That's
because some of that space is used by hardware and not available to
the operating system and applications. The amount you can use varies,
depending on what hardware you have installed, but is usually around
3.1GB.

 

[someothernickname]

I was told by the place where I had my new machine built that 32 bit
Vista home basic could use the full 8GB the motherboard supports. The
bios shows the full 8GB there. I had to use BCD set stuff to get
Vista to the point where it now reports 3007 MB in the computer
properties window. I'm using the free ramdisk, RAMDiskVE, 400MB of
fat32 which photoshop is using for scratch space and it would appear
that this is comiing out of the upper 4GB. Is there a way to use the
additional 3.5 GB out there with the vista ramdisk driver that appears
to be present (ramdisk.inf and ramdisk.sys) in the windows directory?

 

[Bruce Chambers]

I was told by the place where I had my new machine built that 32 bit
Vista home basic could use the full 8GB the motherboard supports.

They lied (or are far too stupid to be in the business of building and
selling computers). You'd need a 64-bit OS (and definitely not the
lowest-possible end OS) to use that much RAM.

The
bios shows the full 8GB there. I had to use BCD set stuff to get
Vista to the point where it now reports 3007 MB in the computer
properties window.

That's normal for your installed OS.

I'm using the free ramdisk, RAMDiskVE, 400MB of
fat32 which photoshop is using for scratch space and it would appear
that this is comiing out of the upper 4GB. Is there a way to use the
additional 3.5 GB out there with the vista ramdisk driver that appears
to be present (ramdisk.inf and ramdisk.sys) in the windows directory?

Replace the Vista Home Basic with a 64-bit version of Vista Business or
Vista Ultimate.



--

Bruce Chambers

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[Ken Blake, MVP]

I was told by the place where I had my new machine built that 32 bit
Vista home basic could use the full 8GB the motherboard supports.

Unfortunately, not everyone who works in the computer field knows what
he's talking about. They were wrong (or maybe deliberately lied to you
to sell you more hardware).

The
bios shows the full 8GB there.

Yes. the hardware can see it. It's 32-bit Vista that can't.

 

[Bob Parker]

Ken (or anyone),

What about PAE (Physical Address Expansion)? With WindowsXP I enabled this
and had no problem getting XP to recognize and use RAM beyond the 4GB limit.
Vista, however, doesn't seem to want to recognize this "feature", even when
I follow the instructions as provided. With or without PAE, my Vista
Ultimate 32bit computer still only recognizes 3582MB of RAM out of a total
of 8MB installed and recongized by the BIOS.

To enable PAE, I have:

1. Created a shortcut to MS DOS Prompt on the desktop
2. Edit properties of the shortcut & enable the "Run as Administrator"
option.
3. Start DOS prompt
4. Run "bcdedit /export bcdbackup" to backup current bcd profile!
5. Run "bcdedit /set pae ForceEnable" to turn on PAE
6. Run "bcdedit" by itself and verify that pae is set to ForceEnable in the
Windows Boot Loader section, then reboot the machine.

However, even after rebooting, the amount of RAM recongized by the system is
exactly the same. Now I know I have some hardware, like my nVidia video card
that memory maps its ram, which is why I see 3.5GB of ram instead of 4 under
normal cirucmstances, but I thought that enabling PAE was supposed to allow
the system to use addresses above the 4GB limit for those things and
maximize the amount of phsyical RAM available to the OS for normal use.

So is this a complete failure to understand how things work on my part? Or
is PAE completely broken in Vista 32bit? Or am I doing something wrong, or
forgetting a step somewhere that is preventing this from working the way
it's supposed to?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Bob

 

[someothernickname]

Replace the Vista Home Basic with a 64-bit version of Vista Business or
Vista Ultimate.

If I understood what I've found, the AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core won't
support the 64-bit version.

 

[someothernickname]

Unfortunately, not everyone who works in the computer field knows what
he's talking about. They were wrong (or maybe deliberately lied to you
to sell you more hardware).


Yes. the hardware can see it. It's 32-bit Vista that can't.


No.

Is it possible that Vista is putting some video drivers or other
things out there? That's what they implied when I called them to talk
about it.

Would it be worth while to purchase the license from RAMDiskVE so I
can get a 4GB ramdisk? Would it in fact use the stuff Vista is not?

 

[someothernickname]

For what purpose would you ned a RAMdrive? That memory is better used
"live". In otherwords, for applications.

Photoshop can be set so that it uses the ram disk for scratch, which
it will do regardless of the RAM, and I have noticed response time
improvement when the 400MB ram drive that is free is set up as a
regular disk. Photoshop in this version will not recognize more than
3.5 of RAM regardless, at least that's what those groups imply.

I'll look into the 64 bit option because it sure would be nice not to
have to shut down everything else when doing photoshop.