Hands0n
19th August 2007, 09:33 AM
I hate to sound like an M$-basher but ..... Vista ...... what a dreadful OS it is!
A friend of mine's daughter has just bought herself a brand new Fujitsu Siemens laptop which comes with 1GB RAM and Windows Vista Home Basic. Of course the obligatory Firewall and Anti-Virus software has to be loaded (AVG replaced Symantec instantly I got my hands on it). It performs like a pig!!
Checking into why the machine seemed to be running like an old i486/66 two things quickly became apparent. 1) Of the 1GB Vista only sees 720MB of the system RAM, and I can't find where the other 280MB has gone (weird or what?). 2) Of the 720MB Vista leaves approximately 30MB for apps after it has loaded (WTF!!!!).
So, the poor thing is spending most of its time paging to disk continuously. Apps fly along only if they can shoehorn into the 30MB that Vista very kindly leaves behind after it has loaded. But as soon as the memory counter hits 0 - which it does alarmingly regularity - we're into Diskworld, and we all know how slow that can be.
Now, given this is Vista Home Basic we are talking about M$'s entry level OS here. No Aero or other flashiness.... The basic footprint of Vista is some 690MB.
How insane is that then?
This is reminiscent of the early days of XP when PCs and Laptops came equipped with 256MB of RAM which was the minimum that particular OS would run in.
I won't even get into how buggy Vista Home is - I was only on the PC for an hour or so to sort out some apps for the young lady. In that time I had to resort to Task Manager to kill apps like IE7 because they had "Stopped Responding" and could not be terminated any other way. "That happens a lot" she offered.
I'm researching a RAM upgrade for her brand new laptop :eek:
A friend of mine's daughter has just bought herself a brand new Fujitsu Siemens laptop which comes with 1GB RAM and Windows Vista Home Basic. Of course the obligatory Firewall and Anti-Virus software has to be loaded (AVG replaced Symantec instantly I got my hands on it). It performs like a pig!!
Checking into why the machine seemed to be running like an old i486/66 two things quickly became apparent. 1) Of the 1GB Vista only sees 720MB of the system RAM, and I can't find where the other 280MB has gone (weird or what?). 2) Of the 720MB Vista leaves approximately 30MB for apps after it has loaded (WTF!!!!).
So, the poor thing is spending most of its time paging to disk continuously. Apps fly along only if they can shoehorn into the 30MB that Vista very kindly leaves behind after it has loaded. But as soon as the memory counter hits 0 - which it does alarmingly regularity - we're into Diskworld, and we all know how slow that can be.
Now, given this is Vista Home Basic we are talking about M$'s entry level OS here. No Aero or other flashiness.... The basic footprint of Vista is some 690MB.
How insane is that then?
This is reminiscent of the early days of XP when PCs and Laptops came equipped with 256MB of RAM which was the minimum that particular OS would run in.
I won't even get into how buggy Vista Home is - I was only on the PC for an hour or so to sort out some apps for the young lady. In that time I had to resort to Task Manager to kill apps like IE7 because they had "Stopped Responding" and could not be terminated any other way. "That happens a lot" she offered.
I'm researching a RAM upgrade for her brand new laptop :eek: