Since a gig is wasted with 32 bit XP or Vista, I wonder how much only using 2 gigs with vista will slow or impede other heavy duty programs that are ram hungry. With dual core or even quad core and multithreaded video encoding apps is there enough ram available in a 2 gig computer running vista?

Has anyone ever tested a dual boot machine with 2 gigs?

I haven't done it, but I have run 2gB on Vista with XP in a Virtual Machine (without any issues). I'd suspect that this would be dependent upon which programs and how much RAM they actually took up. With 72 processes running, I'm using about 1.4 gB of RAM currently (on my 4gB system).

With XP you can get along with 512 mB, but 1 gB is (IMO) a better option for a mature copy of the OS. The benefit of the extra memory is that you don't have to worry about each little thing that's added to your system - so periodic maintenance is less intensive with 1 gB than it is with 512 mB. FWIW - There's still a bunch of people out there using 256 mB on their XP systems!

I'm starting to suspect that Vista will suffer from the same "bloat" as XP - but that the numbers are higher (depending upon the version). Home Basic works fine out of the box with 512 mB, but add a few programs and watch it slow down rapidly. 1 gB will help this, but the speed with which the slowdown occurs makes me suspect that it won't stop with 1 gB - and that 2 gB will be necessary for long term use (at acceptable speeds).

Unfortunately, there's not much anyplace to go after this. You can upgrade to 3 or 4 gB - then you're stuck by the 32 bit OS limit. So, I'd suspect that 64 bit OS's are the future for everyone within the next 5 to 10 years.

thanks John,

I have stayed away from vista, my best machine is getting quite "long in the tooth". When I built it 18 months ago with a single core cpu it was quite fast, due to my overclock and the high price of ram I ended up doing a lot of testing and found for video encoding that 512 megs of pc500/cas2.5 ram actually was faster than 1024 of pc400/cas2

I have to run lean and mean and keep 300 megs free

hopefully 64 bit will take off a little quicker