Quick Vista Question

nicke261192 · 28-01-2007, 12:36

Dad wants to upgrade to Vista when it comes out and he wants the premium edition. He has a laptop with 3ghz processor and 512mb ram and 128mb of that is graphics, i know he has the minimum spec for vista but is it worth getting some more ram for him will it really make it run that smoother? i was thinking of either getting him another 512mb stick or getting a 1gb stick so he can have 1.5gb?

Jon T · 28-01-2007, 12:42

On his current spec, forget it, nowhere near enough RAM.

How many memory slots has he got on the laptop. 2Gb would be better, especially with the shared video memory(can you alter this, Vista would run alot better with 256Mb dedicated to video).

nicke261192 · 28-01-2007, 12:43

i think his laptop can only have 128 to the graphics and he has 2 slots for a max of 2gb, also he has a 40gb hdd and i was looking into buying a larger one, are all laptop harddrives the same connection? IDE?

Delta Whiskey · 28-01-2007, 12:45

The more RAM the better, especially as it to share it with the on-board graphics.

DW

Jon T · 28-01-2007, 12:47

Aero(Vista UI) will run with 128mB video RAM, would run much smoother with 256Mb tho'.

Every laptop i've seen has had an IDE hard drive(2.5 inch format, with a smaller "laptop" ide connection).

nicke261192 · 28-01-2007, 12:51

ok thanks people

VSPNET · 02-02-2007, 13:45

MY partner is running Vista Ultimate on a laptop.

Specs are:
1.6 Celeron
512mb RAM
128mb Graphics

So to put this bluntly the person who told you that a 3ghz machine with 512mb ram is no where near enough to run vista hasnt got a clue about it. The truth is Vista runs faster and better than XP. 512mb Ram will be fine. But if you are planning on gaming then maybe a bit more ram would be advisable.

pooper · 02-02-2007, 14:02

Anandtech has a good write-up on Vista.

RAM analysis is here

keithwalton · 02-02-2007, 14:20

If the laptop has shared ram with the graphics card its unlikely that the graphics chipset will be caperble of aeroglass (pixel shader 2.0min) so i doubt having more ram allocated to video would matter.
You can allways run without aeroglass you just loose most of the shiney new effects.

Can you really notice the difference between 128 and 256megs with aeroglass and the same gpu ? since the minimum is 64megs and it isnt all that memory intensive from what i've seen i wouldnt of thought it would make that much difference excepet at crazy resolutions (2560x1600 etc)

garybuk · 02-02-2007, 14:31

a lot of laptop hard disks are now SATA and not IDE.

morrk · 03-02-2007, 03:42

I ran Vista sweet enough on my laptop, which is 1500 Celeron, 768 meg ram, On board gfx and a 1 gig memory key with Readyboost enabled.