David said:
"Other than that, your cpu is too low to
effectively run Vista, let alone ultimate, and your under powered in the
other 2 areas, memory and hd."
You said his CPU is too low too slow to run not only Vista Ultimate, but
Vista period. You DO include his memory (2 GB) in your list of specs that
are not adequate. And let's not mince words between "too low" and "not
adequate."
And he needs TWO hard drives? Give me a break!
Yes, his cpu is too slow to run ULTIMATE. Let alone HomePremium. Yes 2gb
of memory is low because the video card eats up system memory to cache
certain files. ie... if you video card has 256 mb of memory, it can eat up
to 1gb of system memory, and sometimes more. It's been this way for a long
time now. It did it in Xp, Me, Win2000, and so on. So when I say his
memory is too low, you should take that into account for poor performance,
and your slow video editing. That video card is a memory hog, and there's
nothing you can do about it unless you upgrade to the 64 bit editions.
As for the hd's. Microsoft recommends a 2nd hd for page filing. Or at the
very least a partitioned part of your main hd. They do not recommend the
paging file to be on the same drive as the operating system. I can tell you
the 2nd hd boosted my performance in xp and vista.
Do a search in the community under "memory" and you'll come across many
examples of people frustrated why vista or xp for that matter, why the video
card eats up their ram.
A brilliant tech wrote up the video card vs memory ratios. I am gonna have
to find it and link it here.
Here's a quote from a user named mhonzell:
-If I had a video card with 512Mb or 768Mb of memory on it, it'd take up even
more space in the 3Gb-to-4Gb memory map.
And if I were still using an AGP graphics card, there'd be another block of
memory reserved for the AGP aperture, used when devices on other buses in the
computer want to talk to a graphics card on the AGP bus. I've got a PCIe
graphics card, though, which sits on the same bus as all of the other stuff
and so doesn't need an aperture.
(If you've got a computer with one of those cheap graphics adapters that
uses system memory instead of having RAM of its own, it will of course eat
some of your RAM no matter how much you've got installed.)
Power users with a hankerin' for dual graphics cards may be experiencing
something of a sinking feeling, at this juncture. Yes, the 256Mb reserved for
my little old graphics card means exactly what you think it means: Those two
768Mb graphics cards you can totally justify buying will eat one point five
gigabytes of your 32-bit memory map all by themselves, cutting you down to a
2.5Gb ceiling before you even take the other reservations into account.
This also explains why 1Gb graphics cards haven't hit the consumer market
