Is Vista Configurable?

I'm getting a laptop with 2 gigs of ram and Vista Premium. I've heard a lot of bad things about how Vista is a "resource hog," and I was wondering if you could turn any of the great little shiny features off to lower the memory use. Is this possible?

 

You can turn off all the shiny features, but it still hogs all the memory it wants. I idle at 623 MB of RAM usage.

 

2GB runs vista VERY well...

 

This was another thought of mine.......The notebook comes with 1 gig of ram, but I'm not sure if I should go with a 1 or 2 gig stick to add in.

 

I have 2 GB on my new laptop and it runs perfectly fine - Photoshop CS3 flies on it...just remember that Vista caches memory differently than XP (it caches memory in an attempt to speed up file access, and it usually works) and don't worry about it.

 

With 2GB you do not need to worry or turn off Vista's shiny features. Turning it off, especially Aero Glass may make the notebook's interface look old. Say, if you really want to turn it off, Right click Computer > Properties > Advanced > Performance and tweak it to your liking.

 

mostly bad "rumors"! vista is not a resource hog, it helps managing resources for active processes,
non.use ram = dead ram

yes and no. yes, u can turn that great little shiny feature off, and no - doing this would not lower the memory use. U free any ram, and vista will "hog" it in order to support other running processes

cheers ...

 

With a decent CPU and 2GB RAM, Vista runs quite smooth. In a sense, it is more efficient than XP. Same as that with XP, you might want to turn off those useless services and some auto startup programs. You also want to get rid of all those pre-installed bloatware coming with the new computer.

 

Note that there aren't really any freely available themes for Vista yet besides those that come in the box. I'm not sure if this is because MS made it really difficult to theme Vista, or because no one really wants to theme it. Either way, there's a paucity of selections at the moment.

 

I always chuckle when I see comments about memory or CPU hogging. I mean really! Unless there is something else that you want to run at the same time that is in conflict, what were you planning to to with that memory or CPU capacity? Save it for later?

 

Vista gets Moody unless it has 2GB of space to play with.

 

No it doesn't that's a bald face lie. I have run Vista Ultimate with 1GB for 2 months and it ran fine. I know of at least 5 people who have run it fine with 1GB of Ram. 1GB is perfectly fine. Vista will run without hiccups with up to 256MB of ram left. I have run VMs using 512mb of ram, and had the system perfectly usuable.

 

There's really no reason not to give 32-bit Windows the maximum 3.24GB it can use, or at least the 2GB that can be easily installed.

 

I have vista home basic on a celeron Acer Aspire L310 Slim Desktop. When it had 512mbs of Ram it had 0mbs free and ran fine (no games, just office and browsing, music). Windows Vista, in an attempt to make your PC faster, uses up free ram. If a program needs more ram it releases it. The new task manager in vista, by just looking at the amount of ram free doesn't mean that if the number is low you are going to have performance issues.

In Windows XP when your ram is low, because you have a program taking up all the memory or have many programs running, will start to slow down. Basically because your fast ram is all used up and is now writing to disk as a secondary "ram".

More RAM = more Vista can play with to make itself faster. It doesn't need to use the ram, it just does to make things faster.

RAM > Hard Drive.

 

I actually had a machine running Vista with 512MB of RAM until 2.5 months ago. Its a Athlon XP 2800+ and runs Vista Business just fine. (I did tweak Vista's services and disable dwm/aero glass). Of course now that it has 1GB of RAM, its faster, but thats without a doubt (its the same on XP).

 

patching Vista to run custom themes is no harder than with XP, it's just that the selection is somewhat lacking. my favorite Vista theme is just a tweaked version of the regular that removes the diagonal streaks in the window, makes the minimize/maximize/close widgets translucent when not hovered, and removes the hideous white background shading in windows titles. IMO it's a much cleaner, professional looking scheme.

aeroxp.org, neowin and, of course, deviantart are the best places to find Vista Glass themes.

 

There are some pretty nice themes for Vista on joejoe.org

 

so let me get this straight- Vista uses as much ram as it can to speed things up, but when another program needs it, Vista lets the program have as much as it wants?

 

yes, oui, si, ja ...

cheers ...

 

in a nutshell, vista takes stock of the whole environment, as soon as a process requires more resource to perform, vista would/will allocate the resource as needed and taking away from process that is not needed

one of the reason, one feels that vista gets better with time (self-learn)

(and i m full of hot air

cheers ...