Windows Vista on 1GB of Ram Totally Realistic

26 May, 2007

Windows Vista on 1GB of Ram Totally Realistic

Posted by: Jason Burns In: Windows

Today my friend came by for a planned work session on his new laptop. The machine in question was an HP dv6000 series with 1GB of Ram, a 60GB 4200rpm HD, 1.6Ghz Turion 64 X2 and a 128MB shared ram nVidia GeForce Go 6100 series video card.

It has the shiny little Vista Ready logo on it so I thought why not give it a go. I installed Vista Home Premium on it and it was off and running. After updating video drivers it got a very meager 2.3 Windows Vista Performance Index score but was still capable of running Aero and it ran it quite well.

Over all the entire system runs very well, after installing the standard fair of software, I also installed Office 2007 in about 12 minutes, not bad at all.

I thought it was fair to relate the results of this install just to offset the tons of posts I have read saying you need 4GB of Ram to run Vista well.

3 Responses to "Windows Vista on 1GB of Ram Totally Realistic"

1 | Raza

February 25th, 2008 at 4:38 am

VISTA Home Premium runs absolutely fine for me on my 1GB DDR-400 RAM. There’s a lot of bull doing the rounds that you need 2GB at the very least. They couldn’t be more wrong tbh.

2 | Bob

September 7th, 2008 at 6:46 am

I’m also running Vista on a P4 2.6ghz with 1GB DDR-400… however, I find that while it runs ok, it’s still a bit sluggish. I’ve used Vista on another machine that had 2GB and I could definitely see a difference. After running Vista on mine for almost 2 years with 1GB, I know for a fact that my box needs a RAM upgrade - I found two matched sticks of 1GB RAM at Newegg.com for $57 shipped so I’m thinking I want to upgrade. My poor PC is over 5 years old now - I built it back in ‘03 - but it still runs great. XP on this box is LIGHTENING fast.

So - my overall opinion is that yes, Vista is operable on 1GB … kinda smooth, runs my games (Sims 2, Need For Speed series - Underground, Most Wanted, Pro Street) with no problem, but for this OS to be “happy” it needs 2GB or more. It’s functional but it can be so much better.

3 | Jason Burns

September 7th, 2008 at 10:18 am

@Bob: I totally agree Bob, more is always better, I run with 4GB on 64-bit Vista and 3GB on 32-bit Vista and with RAM as cheap as it is, I would go higher on the 64-bit just for the “Tim Allen” factor (grunts) but my point was that people saying it will not run on 1GB are wrong, in which it seems you agree, thanks for the comment!

Comment Form

Scott Miller: You know, I agree with you guys, and I have to say, many kudos to keeping this a clean discussion. I myself am an OS mutt. I use XP on older machine
JOSE COLON: WHERE DO I GO TO DOWNLOAD MOVIES TO MY IPOD AND WHAT PROGRAM DO I NEED TO HAVE TO DOWNLOAD THE MOVIES,,
KillGuta: Don't really know why you guys got these problems, but my WoW is running VERY smoothly (exactly like on XP). Also I am using a self moded Vista SP1 ve

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Windows Vista on 1GB of Ram Totally Realistic