Well when i went to Bestbuy, I bought myself a HP Pavilion Desktop with a OS of Windows Vista. It has 2.2 GHz CPU, AMD Live, and 1024 MB of RAM, but when i started the computer it shows that i have 894 MB of RAM. How come its not 1024 MB?

Likely the remaining RAM is devoted to an onboard video card (that uses RAM in place of video RAM). Part of the new display driver model is a revamp of how memory usage is displayed. Try typing "dxdiag" (without the quotes) at the Start button, then clicking on the Video tab to see the usage for your video card.

I cannot believe retailers are selling Vista PC's with only 1 gig of ram....2 should be the absolute minimum....

I'm typing this on a Compaq laptop that came with 512 mB of RAM (only 504 shows due to the vid card). It's Vista Home Basic and is only used at the wife's office - so it works quite well with little RAM.

It's a trade off between cost and performance. These systems function fine for their intended purpose. Trying to get more performance out of them is a losing proposition - since they were optimized for cost rather than performance.

The average user only wants to surf the web, check email, and maybe do something simple with music or movies. So that's what the manufacturer's aim at.

That's where a lot of people run into problems. web and e-mail are no big deal. But add music and the demands go up on your hardware, and people start getting disappointed. Throw in video and you take a quantum leap were a bare bones PC typically falls down. With everything on the web going multimedia, it's becoming more difficult to get by on a system like you describe (just like it being almost impossible to use dial-up any more).

I also just bought a HP laptop with Vista. Mine shows the same thing, except mine shows a little bit more RAM. I think its about 940. It came with 1G RAM and runs fine. I don't do any extremely intense work with mine, but it's probably a good bit more than the average user. I swore that I wasn't going to buy a computer with
Vista for at least a few years, but I must say I'm pleasantly surprised. I will be adding another partition so that I can run Ubuntu though.

Unfortunately we PC users (as a group) have been conditioned into accepting more CPU speed and more RAM as an answer to everything. Above posts are correct about usage of RAM . Vista should do OK with 512 as long as you keep eye-candy to a minimum and are just 'net surfing or simple office software. Music and video / gaming have always been the memory hogs and consequently they have to "peel" off some of the system RAM to use for embedded video.

If I have 75 GB of space on my hard-drive, and have 54.6 free space, would putting music in that free space slow my PC down?

Generally it won't cause a problem unless your disk gets too full. If the disk is so full that programs don't have space for cache files, pagefiles, etc, then you can run into problems. Keep 5%-10% free and you should be fine.

Thank you for your quick response jpfieber.