OT: vista cool feature!

[Fairlight]

With neither thought nor caution, Chris Rendall blurted:
> 
> On newer hardware I've not found performance to be a problem.  I would
> recommend at least 1GB of RAM, however.  With less than 1GB of RAM Vista
> can get a rather slow.  

I wouldn't even think of assembling a system with less than 2GB nowadays.
Heck, my own machine uses Win2K and I hover around 430-500MB in use with
only my standard background apps, Firefox, and PuTTY up.  If Vista is more
bloated, that means with 1GB you'd far more easily hit swap.

My wife and I always tried to stay ahead of the memory size curve.  She got
4MB when 2MB was standard on the 386.  I got 16MB when 4MB was standard on
the 486.  I purposely went for 2GB on this machine, having watched the
memory requirements mushroom over the 8yrs that I had the last machine,
which had 128MB.  I try to keep my boxes going at least five years.
Arcadia MkIII lasted 8yrs.  You do that, you want room to grow.  And
there's no way I'd think of putting Vista on with 1GB.  Heck, the only
reason my laptop only has 1GB with XP is because at the time I couldn't
afford the $2200 model that had more RAM and a more powerful NVidia card
than I got in mine.

If you're going to buy a machine to last 4-5 years, especially if you do
any kind of performance-intensive stuff, I wouldn't put together a machine
with <2GB, and I'd really shoot for 4-6GB if you can afford it.  I give it
1-2yrs before 2GB is a -minimum- requirement for games, based on what I'm
seeing lately.  Depending what you have right now, 1GB already isn't
necessarily sufficient.  Mind you, that's for a multi-purpose system that
sees some action.  You can wait for a spreadsheet to swap--that happens in
a game, you're likely dead in-game.  I know web servers with 8GB that never
use anything near that; people just threw money at the best they could get.

mark->