What's The Real Minimum Requirement Of Vista

have heard that vista can only handle 3gig of ram. is this true?
i have heard also that vista cannot run smoothly on a 1gig ram pc. is this true?


i'll be buying a desktop and a laptop in a month and my budget is not that big. one will suffer if i add more to one and i'm trying to maintain a balance.

my option is to buy a 1 gig ram laptop and beef up the desktop but i don't want a slow laptop also.

anyone who has an experience on using a vista and a xp with the same softwares. is there a difference.

Vista x32 can handle 3.5Gbs while Vista x64 can handle 4gb. Well if you get Vista Home basic and strip it down to just a basic operating system then yeah it will run smoothly. Other then that you want at least 2 gigs to handle the vista load after you install it. If your smart I sink your money into the laptop and then build your desktop to save money if your looking for the right parts I start out with my topic that I created when I build my computer, a slight warning they may not be listed on newegg anymore.

Well in reality Vista with Aero can run fine with 1 gig of ram and an Intel GMA 950 for god's sake! It's just that the other programs and unnecessary services bog it down. I like it more than XP. It's really stable now after Service Pack 1

My computer ran pretty smoothly with Vista Home Premium running Aero on 1 GB of ram. It lagged a bit though, and half of my RAM was constantly being used by Vista. You don't have to have 3gigs of RAM, but more than a gig would be best. Especially if you are going to run multiple applications at once.

I ran Vista Ultimate very cleanly on 512 mb ram ,with aero , flip 3d ,etc, but now i run it on 2 GB and there's no big difference . The official system requirements are very real indeed : 800 mHz processor / 512 Mb ram / 32 mb graphic card /20 GB hdd .

The 32 bits version of vista can handle 4 GB ram but the 64 bits version can handle up to 128 GB ram for Business, Enterprise and Ultimate .

You will never be able to appreciate Vista if you go with its minimum requirements.
All i know is, If you really wanted to appreciate the power of Vista, You should have a minimum RAM of 1Gb and have enough virtual memory in the HDD. You should also have a good display for so many things to be good in your system which i am sure you want...

All the above things of mine are words of Wisdom from my past 1 year of Vista usage.

I can agree somewhat that any new computer today could handle vista on 1gig of RAM and thats if the computer is nothing more then sending emails and surfing the net and using the built in problems to type documes or **cough** design graphics. However, coolcat makes two good points; first one being that Vista is taking half the RAM and then some already and of course that leads into point two about running multiple programs you need the RAM to cover the slow downs. Of course I will mention this that if you use the usb flash stick method for helping speed up your computer, it is not adding RAM but it will help free up some room and speed programs up.

well for an update i have some lend my some money and this is what i got

laptop dual core 4mb cache 2.0+ghz(can't remember), 4gb ram, and a 8600 nvidia video card. at first glance im worried that its slow because half of ram is used by vista. but as the updates arrived, its only 20-30% i think.

don't need to power down some stuff but i know it will come.

really happy about it