Ok a question about Vista (Power probably will be able to answer this the best)

[Spindel]

Why the hell is Vista 64-bit limited to:

8 GB RAM on Vista Home Basic?
16 GB RAM on Vista Home Premium?
128 GB RAM on other versions?

We all know that one of the biggest gains in switching from 32-bit to 64 bit was that you moved from:

2^32 bits (4 GiB) memory addressing space
to
2^64 bits ( 16 EiB (Exa) ) memory addressing space

Now I know it will be a long time before we will be able to use even 1 EB

BUT WHY limit the OS??????

[chedabob]

Because on Home Basic you don't really need any more than 1gb of ram.

[E6600]

It needs CPU overhead to compute the addresses (or something like that) so to minimize that they limit how much you can address. That's the basic idea behind it.

[MrC]

Aka idiotic business practice.

[Power666]

MS likes to charge more for more RAM access. It is kinda like how you need XP Professional or Vista Business/Ultimate to use all the CPU's in a dual socket system (but Vista Home works with dual core and quad core chips fine).

Originally Posted by chedabob

Because on Home Basic you don't really need any more than 1gb of ram.

Except that Vista (any version) runs best with 2 GB of RAM.

[MrC]

Originally Posted by Power666

MS likes to charge more for more RAM access. It is kinda like how you need XP Professional or Vista Business/Ultimate to use all the CPU's in a dual socket system (but Vista Home works with dual core and quad core chips fine).

Exactly, bad business practice. They charge for virtual things, and will end up with more overhead in their programming.

[chedabob]

Originally Posted by Power666

Except that Vista (any version) runs best with 2 GB of RAM.

If you don't run Aero, it runs fine on 1gb.

[:D:]

But isn't it just a stripped down version of XP then?

[Darth Alec]

How do I disable aero?

I can't find that damned option.

[Power666]

Originally Posted by chedabob

If you don't run Aero, it runs fine on 1gb.

The Vista RAM foot print for the OS itself sets between 400 MB and 640 MB. That large difference is likely accounted for Aero and other options being enabled/disabled. That is a lot for just the OS.

Additionally, programs running under Vista take up more RAM than they did. Games and any 3D application are notorious for their RAM growth due to virtualized graphics memory which consume 60% more memory than they did under XP. Combine that with the caching Vista likes to do, 2 GB is the ideal amount of RAM for Vista.