Another reason to hate Vista... It's a major memory hog

[Spino]

Unbelievable. Yes, I know, I'm stating the obvious but it's the implication for gamers that really bugs me. Now that 1gig systems have become the norm MS throws an OS on us that, at least as far as gamers are concerned, needs 4 gigs to run state of the art games smoothly. :anger:

http://www.bcchardware.com/index.php...1&limitstart=0

Here's a few choice paragraphs to chew on before the benchmarking section begins...

That's right dear friends! A fresh install of Windows Vista Ultimate will hog over 1GB of system memory - just to run. This screenshot was taken at first boot and from there, the memory usage only climbed until it stabilized at a mere 1.11GB - almost 28% of our system's memory. Granted there is still 2.89GB free, but out of the box Vista is a RAM pig.

We booted up with 2GB of memory installed, fearing that we would see results very similar to what we captured above. With less memory available, Vista stripped itself down to a mere 680MB of memory at first boot and leveled off somewhere around 784MB. It's using less overall memory, but with less RAM installed it is now using over 38% of our memory just to operate. We are now down to 1.2GB to run all of our applications.

Compare these numbers to my current install of Windows XP on my main machine. I have a ton of applications open and am running 63 processes at the moment. I have two instances of Folding @ Home running, two instances of Firefox, a single instance of Internet Explorer running, with Outlook open, Skype, MSN, a backup program, Trillian, Palm Desktop, NOD32 and Ultramon to control three displays. On this heavily bogged system, I'm using 563MB of RAM and I have a lot going on. Under Vista, this would hog much more memory.