Vista 2gb vs 3gb ram

Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. He asks:. I have no performance complaints.

I've got a lot of experience with different PC configurations, and I can say with confidence that 2GB is more than enough for even the most demanding business user. First, let's talk about that 2GB configuration. I've used Vista on more than a dozen machines from at least six manufacturers.

In more than a month of sometimes insanely heavy use with each one, I have never reached a state where either one performed unacceptably because it was gasping for RAM. At the moment, as you can see from the Task Manager snippet on the right, I'm running 81 processes on this desktop PC, including the following:. According to Task Manager, 1.

From experience, I know I could open another half-dozen programs and rip a music CD and still not notice any change in performance. If you use a similar mix of apps, you should see similar results. For that type of heavy multitasking, the bump from 1GB to 2GB has a clear impact and costs very little.

But adding an extra 2GB beyond that doesn't usually result in any noticeable improvement in performance or reliability.

As I noted earlier, there are two big exceptions to this general advice. Thus the first reaction usually is that the memory chips or with the mainboard has a hardware defect. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

Vista can indeed address 4GB of memory. However, the maximum amount of RAM that can be used by the system and applications is 3. Some devices need a dedicated space in memory. A typical example is a video card that utilizes the system memory.

You might as well remove it. I am not a system programmer, but for me that seems to be a design error, probably one that is very old. All you have to do is to install Vista x64 instead of Vista x Note that it is not possible to upgrade Vista x86 to Vista x I will post some articles about the Vista x86 vs.

Vista x64 issue very soon. So if you think of going this route, you might as well wait some more days before you make up your mind. In the meantime you can read a former article about the Vista x86 vs.

Vista x64 issue. You might think that Microsoft found an even better workaround, though. It is Service Pack 1. I have read about this before, but today I tried it myself. You might think that Microsoft corrected this design error, but unfortunately that is not the case. All they did is to change what is displayed in the System Properties. I guess this problem kept the support personal of PC vendors around the globe busy. And since RAM is getting cheaper every day, the situation would have become worse soon.

So Microsoft decided to solve this issue the easy way. System Properties and also the Welcome Center, which is the first place you go to check the amount of memory, simply displays 4GB and so everyone is happy now. Subscribe to 4sysops newsletter! The latter one is the amount of memory you can really use, and the first one indicates how much money you just have wasted if you put 4GB in your PC.

You can read more about this issue in this KB article. Want to write for 4sysops? We are looking for new authors.

Read 4sysops without ads and for free by becoming a member! Some applications have separate installers for bit and bit operating systems. This second part of the Office bit vs. He has more than Then adding a loft extension and suggesting you can now own a snooker table.

Indeed if you chop the snooker table in half and put half of it in the loft you can have it or you could fill the room with it and leave no space to wander round and take your shot.

However its not so hard to stick a cushion down the cut edges and make two smaller tables. Now you can use your snooker table for two games of pool. Included in this space is everything. When you read some data from the disc it gets stored in a space with an address - that address is in the list of 4billion available addresses.

The same thing is true if you have a mb graphics card million of those addresses must be taken out of your RAM addresses and reserved just to get data onto the screen. Every time you press a key on your keyboard, receive some data over the network, send an image over USB to your printer or make a sound that information is transferred to and from the devices via those addressed locations. The Chipset is responsible for organising this mapping.

It maps the physical addresses into a virtual 4GB space. If the app that is in that RAM area wants to write to the screen you can see life will become very tricky and the whole process to continue the metaphor would involve running up the stairs and launching the balls at the same velocity on the other half of the table.

The reason for this is that if you install pairs e. If you got to 4 GB with 1 x 2 GB and 1 x 1 GB then you probably won't see in improvement and dual channel memory access can't be enabled across that 1 x 2 GB chip.

This will allow multiple 32bit Virtual machines and get you all of your memory. Of course at a cost of multiple OS's running and hardware abstraction that means you won't get the best out of your cool kit. But there are very few applications that have gone to the effort to make that work. If you want to find out more you should look at how Virtual Memory works, and How page faults trigger memory management and what Context switching means.

I am just on the verge of buying a new laptop with Vista Business pre-installed. If that were the case, perhaps I would be better off buying 4Gb - 1 for Vista and 3 for me. Hi guys.. So its not the matter of 32 bit or 64 bit , moreover service pack 1 didnt able to slove this problem.

So if u guys a have any idea pls post or mail me at aks7sach rediffmail. I'm also having the same problem. John Ratsey , May 9, I went from 2 to 4gb even though Vista bit only uses about 3. It is not eye-popping, just really nice. Apps load faster, start-up is a few seconds faster and the FZ just handles the "load" better when I am doing a lot of different tasks.

It's a dual channel memory configuration and the only difference I notice is that with 4GB RAM apps especially big apps like games load faster. With memory prices so low, it wouldn't hurt to ungrade to 4GB. Both will give you higher system stability - which is what most people look for now a days. You must log in or sign up to reply here. Show Ignored Content. Similar Threads - Performance Difference. Replies: 8 Views: Replies: 2 Views: