Vista Ultimate + 1GB RAM = Unhappy Chappy

I bought an Acer laptop with 1GB of memory and Vista Ultimate. Just turning it on and opening up IE, the memory usage was 763 MB. Given a 256 MB commitment to the shared graphics card, that's me thrashing the virtual memory before I even do anything. Turns out there are a few things you can tweak to get Vista to wind its neck in a bit but your average joe is never going to know that nor care to find out.

The cost of 2GB SODIMMs for laptops is exorbitant (about three times the cost of a 1GB module) so getting the thing to the recommended 4GB RAM for Vista is going to scorch your wallet somewhat.

Selling Vista with 1GB of RAM results in your customers thinking either your laptop is rubbish or (more rarely I wager) coming to the correct conclusion that Vista is a bloated RAM-hoover and regretting whatever part of their purchase price paid for the OEM Vista copy that they want rid of but can't sell.

I ended up installing Ubuntu which does the same thing (run a browser) in 172 MB, which is in the same ballpark as XP which is about the 240MB mark.

Looks like there isn't a way for me to trade in my Vista license for an XP one so I'm stuck with an OS I didn't even want in the first place.

Bad call Acer, number 1 for selling Vista and number 2 for not putting at least 2GB of RAM in every laptop.

Trying to run Vista on 1GB of RAM is like driving a car with square wheels.