How much ram do you need if you run Vista?
info@drakehs.com

Lots of computers are being sold to consumers with only one gigabyte of ram. This is fine if you only use the machine to read your email, use Word documents, and play the installed Vista games. However, most computer users these days want to do more.

ZDNet performed tests with differing amounts of applications and processes running on a Vista computer and found that if you are a "normal" or even a "power" user; 2 GB of ram is all that is needed. That covered running two remote sessions, four sidebar gadgets, synching a 610mb file Outlook file, eleven windows explorer windows open, 2 instances of Internet Explorer 7 with 40 tabs open. That is a lot of stuff going on at the same time, and according to Task Manager they were only using 1.4 GB of ram.

However, the need for more ram goes up if you run Vista64 or one or more instances of Virtual Machine on your system. 32bit systems running Vista can only use 3 GB of ram, so even if you have more physically installed, it won't recognize it. Vista64 will recognize more, so if you really need loads of ram, the 64bit version is the way to go.