Windows Vista is a resource hog. And nowhere is this more evident than in the amount of system memory that has to be fed into the operating system in order to guarantee an optimal user experience. Microsoft seems to indicate that for Windows Vista Home Basic, 512 MB of RAM will suffice. The same is valid for Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate, only that in the case of the high-end editions of the platform, the amount of system memory is upped to 1 GB. But users have to understand that these are the minimum recommended system configurations. The fact of the matter is that Vista starts acting properly somewhere at 2 GB, but the sky's the limit, especially with the 64-bit SKUs; well, not actually the sky, but 128 GB of RAM.

"Memory management in Microsoft Windows operating systems has evolved into a rich and sophisticated architecture," the Redmond company boasts. "With each release of Windows, memory management supports many new features and capabilities. Advances in algorithms and techniques yield a rich and sophisticated code base, which is maintained as a single code base for all platforms and SKUs. Memory management improvements in Windows Vista focused on areas such as dynamic system address space, enhanced NUMA and large system/page support, advanced video model support, I/O and section access, and robustness and diagnosability."

ZDNet is reporting that Windows Vista encounters serious problems when attempting to move large numbers of files. The moving process in Vista and the subsequent out of memory error are independent of the actual cumulated size of the files. Microsoft's latest operating system simply fails to move in excess of 15,000 items. Once the user is hit with an out of memory error, the Windows Vista shell can begin to lose integrity, with absent menus and tabs as well as reboots or even the blue screen of death. Microsoft does have a hotfix available for download, but users have to specifically require it, and the company plans to fix the issue in Vista SP1.