Vista Home Premium on a laptop with 512 MB RAM?

[buckslayer80]

I was browsing the tech specials links I get every day and noticed this on sale:

6.19lb Inspiron 1501 Desktop Replacement Notebook AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50, 15.4in WideScreen, 512MB/60GB , CD/DVD burner, 802.11g wireless, 1yr warranty, Vista Home Basic for $1418 - auto $350 off in cart = $1068 shipped free.

How in the world can they ship that notebook with only 512 MB of memory. There's no way that setup is paractical.

I haven't read much on the differences in the resource consumption of the various Vista editions yet, but I doubt they vary that much. As an example here's a screenshot of my performance tab. All I have open at the moment are about 12 webpages in tabs in IE7, remote desktop, and 4 or 5 smaller apps like Outlook. But take a look at my memory consumption.

Have any of you seen or tried installing Vista on a box with the minimum specs or close to it? I don't think it would even be useable.

[LuckyTxGuy]

Wowzers! That is a ton of memory usage!

As for a Vista machine with 512...that's a joke. Sort of like an XP machine with 256 in my opinion. It will work but it won't be good. Actually I'm doing some work right now on an older Dell Latitude that was previously owned as a company computer, it's running XP Pro and has 128 MB of ram.LOL!!! I couldn't believe it. And I've got to be honest, it actually ran "ok" while going one and downloading XP updates etc. I'm sure you couldn't do much more than that with it, but it was at least usable, which was a surprise to me.

I haven't used Vista just a ton yet but I did install it in a VM on my laptop and dedicated 1 GB of ram to it and honestly, it ran great. I used Vista some on a new Dell desktop that I bought for a customer (Core 2 and 1 GB of ram) and it ran great, including all the aero stuff. I opened up multiple programs but nothing really labor intensive and it rarely used much more than half a gig of ram to my shock. Sometimes it would go up to around 768 MB or so but it never (that I saw) maxed out the gig.

I know I'm rambling.lol But ya I can't imagine buying a Vista machine with only 512. That's pretty scary.

[buckslayer80]

I run 64 bit Ultimate, so maybe it uses a lot more. I still have to read up on it.

[LuckyTxGuy]

Oh ya BTW, both of those instances of Vista were Vista Home Premium for what it's worth.