ram--not enough?

[Guest]

I bought a new machine with vista home premium. It came with just a little
over 1 GB of Ram installed.

On my sidebar I have the memory gauge. With just a few programs running in
the background and using IE, the gauge goes up to 80+%.

Do I need to get more memory? Is 1GB just the bare minimum needed to run
vista?

Thanks to all

Don

 

[Dustin Harper]

It depends on what is running in the background. Some manufacturers load
the OS with a bunch of crap that runs in the background. You can run
MSCONFIG to stop some processes from starting when you boot up.

I have 1 GB in one of my machines, and it does fill up quick. The
absolute minimum is 512MB, but that is slow. 1 GB is normal for most
users, and 1.5-2GB for gaming or Photoshop type users. As always, more
is better!

 

[Reggie Dunbar]

If you're not running anything too taxing, I'd opt for the cheaper
Flashdrive/Readyboost option. If you're a gamer or doing multimedia work,
then the faster RAM is indeed better.

 

[Travis King]

I bought a new machine with vista home premium. It came with just a little
over 1 GB of Ram installed.

On my sidebar I have the memory gauge. With just a few programs running in
the background and using IE, the gauge goes up to 80+%.

Do I need to get more memory? Is 1GB just the bare minimum needed to run
vista?

Thanks to all

Don

I've got a gig and a half and I never see my RAM usage go above 50%
except for when I first start my system. My RAM usage is typically in
the 30's or 40's.

 

[Lakesidezx]

I've got a gig and a half and I never see my RAM usage go above 50% except
for when I first start my system. My RAM usage is typically in the 30's
or 40's.

Same here, I've got 2GB RAM and my ram usage for vista home premie is almost
always at about 29-36% except upon initial startup when it goes higher but
then settles back down.

As far as bare minimum, I believe that 1GB is the bare minimum for vista to
run acceptably, 2GB being better and usually enough for the most common of
users.

 

[Steve Thackery]

Don't worry - as the saying goes, unused RAM is wasted RAM. Basically,
Vista helps itself to lots of RAM in order to speed things up as much as
possible. As soon as an application requests it, the OS relinquishes it.

So it isn't a problem.

Of course, 2G is better!

Thack

 

[thetruthhurts]

Get more RAM, I ran Vista for two months with 1 GB and it was usually
around 70% mem utilization. The biggest mem hogs on my machine are
Office 2007 apps.

As far as Readyboost, forget it, spend the money on RAM. To get
Readyboost to work you need a fast flashdrive, which is not much
cheaper than another GB of memory. The memory will help a lot more.