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Vista Home basic -> XP

C

CoPilotJim

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 29, 2004
Messages
120
Hey Everyone,

Recently I was gifted an acer 5050 (refurbed deal from buy.com - $400). It comes with a 2.2 ghz turion 64 (supposed to be 2ghz but I got hooked up somehow), 1 gig of ram, integrated graphics. It's actually a decent laptop even though build quality isn't the greatest. Anyway it came pre-installed with Vista Home Basic but I ended up installing XP onto the laptop.

There were only a few things I liked about vista (I only played with vista for about 2 days). The interface was great, it looks really nice even though there's no aero support in basic. Also the new start menu is really convenient as well, I enjoy the way it simplifies programs into the list.

Unfortunately I ended up having to install XP onto the laptop. Vista took a long time to boot up, launched programs slowly, ran quite a bit slower, freezed quite a bit, and ate up ram like there's no tomorrow. I figured instead of paying $100 bucks to buy more ram I'd just downgrade to XP. If I had a dual core and 2gb of ram I would have considered staying with vista in its current state, but I'll have to give it another go in a year or so (assuming I don't buy a macbook or macbook pro in that time frame). Once I installed XP it was noticeably faster, and it made me realize poorly vista was running.

Overall vista was pretty and it could have met my needs (which are just surfing web/office/music/etc) but it seems to run poorly only doing those things.
 
Oline61 said:
You realize it's supposed to do that, right? Instead of leaving unused RAM to waste Vista uses it until something else needs it then frees it up.
Click to expand...

Unused RAM isn't "wasted". I hate seeing that statement.

If all your RAM is in use, then when you launch a new app, or have an application decide that it needs to load something, or whatever, you get to wait while what is currently in RAM is paged out. There's a cost associated with "[freeing] it up".

Unused RAM serves a purpose; the question is how much unused RAM do you want... and that's completely dependent on how much you have and how you use your system.
 
Khanmots said:
Unused RAM isn't "wasted". I hate seeing that statement.

If all your RAM is in use, then when you launch a new app, or have an application decide that it needs to load something, or whatever, you get to wait while what is currently in RAM is paged out. There's a cost associated with "[freeing] it up".

Unused RAM serves a purpose; the question is how much unused RAM do you want... and that's completely dependent on how much you have and how you use your system.
Click to expand...

Actually, I don't think it necessarily has to be paged out. I think it depends on whether or not that RAM is actually required. If it's RAM that is being used by an active program, then it will have to be paged out, but what if Vista has a mechanism for simply caching programs for quick usage (and this cache is entirely unnecessary). If a program requests memory that is being used by this cache, then it will essentially replace and invalidate the cache at no hard disk cost.
 
True enough, although I'm not convinced that's what Vista is doing... although I'll hopefully get my DVD tommorow and can start experimenting :)
 
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