A gig of RAM is not enough for Vista

January 20, 2007 · 1 min read

I was asked to be one of the folks answering questions at the big Phoenix "Ready for a New Day" launch event.  Definitely a fun experience, and pretty well attended.  A common question that came up is what level of hardware runs well with Vista?  The answer I had given to everyone is to have 1.5 gigs of RAM, and a nice DirectX 9 video card if you want the cool Aero effects.  Over the past couple days I got to experience what it's like when you don't have enough RAM.

I originally had two sticks of DDR RAM in my laptop, a gig and a quarter gig.  1.25 gigs with Vista ran OK, not great.  A little bit of paging here and there.  But recently the machine stopped charging the batteries at all, even though everything else worked.  Found out it was a problem with the motherboard, and Dell was kind to ship another one out to me.  So after trading that out last week, for some reason the new board wouldn't recognize the 256 meg stick.  "Okay," I thought, "I've been wanting to upgrade the RAM anyway."  I thought I could get by with just the one gig of RAM until I could put another gig stick in the machine, but with both IE and Visual Studio open, this window comes up quite often:

If you're developing on a Vista box, 1.5 gigs is really the minimum configuration you want.  I went out and upgraded to 2 gigs, and it has been smooth sailing.  The memory manufacturers will sure be raking in the profit during 2007.

Curious about what's new and exciting in Vista?  Take a look!

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Lorin Thwaits

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