14 DAY TRIAL // Over the last few days we've been mentioning two bad news that have cast a shadow over the official announcement of the six Vista versions. One of them referred to the fact that Windows Vista will not have EFI booting support until Longhorn Server is released, and that this type of booting will only be available to 64 bit processors. There is no doubt about this news, the announcement being made by a Microsoft official.
However, for the other one, with Vista's insatiable hunger for memory, one correction needs to be made, otherwise we would enter a well-known anti-Microsoft pattern.
The 800 megabytes of memory The Inquirer was talking about in its article were not a measure of the computer's physical memory, but the combination between the physical one and the virtual one, known as ?commit charge".
For the screenshot available here, one can easily see that the physical memory used by Vista in idle mode was around 400 MB of the 1GB, 600 megabytes being still available. Moreover, the screenshot was not taken using the final Vista release.
There is no doubt that there are significant differences between Windows XP's system requirements and Windows Vista's ones, the latter being much more demanding.
For example, for a computer with 256 MB of RAM and running XP Professional together with an antivirus application, an MP3 player, two instant messaging clients, an Office document and a browser with several tabs, the memory figures looked like this:
- Available physical memory: 60MB - Commit charge: 457 MB
At the same time, it's worth mentioning that although Windows adjusts the available memory depending on the system conditions, running additional demanding applications without driving your hard disk berserk will require a sufficient amount of physical memory, say 2 GB.
Find out more about Windows' memory management here.