Laptop Memory

dopievoli

I just got a dell laptop and it only comes with 516 512 megs and I'm thinking of getting 2gb upgrade for it. Can vista home basic even run on a 1.86ghz and 516meg laptop smoothly? also if there was any good websites to go to compare prices it would be helpful.

Neito

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How did you manage to get 516 megs of ram?

Page

Yea that's a weird number, but vista only runs smoothly on about 2gbs of ram, though it will run on that starting amount of ram.

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Home Basic, doesn't that not have the Aero skin? And I think you mean 512 MegaBytes of RAM.

Page

Actually I believe the 516MB, as laptops tend to have very odd numbers, my current laptop (which I will be so happy when I can destroy with a sledgehammer) currently has 448MB of ram.

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Actually I believe the 516MB, as laptops tend to have very odd numbers, my current laptop (which I will be so happy when I can destroy with a sledgehammer) currently has 448MB of ram.

Really!? O.o Why the hell is that?

Apreche

Odds are you do not have 448MB or 516MB of RAM. The only reasonable way that can happen is if some of your RAM is broken. Odds are that you have 512MB, but when the computer counts the memory, you won't see the exact number because it is counting megabytes, but you have 512 mibibytes.

Omnutia

I'm pretty sure I have just 512mb of ram. I want to get the 4gb deal CCLonline has and was wondering what kind of specs you need to run XP virtulaized inside Ubuntu.

Apreche

I'm pretty sure I have just 512mb of ram. I want to get the 4gb deal CCLonline has and was wondering what kind of specs you need to run XP virtulaized inside Ubuntu.

Well, if it's a laptop first make sure that it is capable of holding 4G.

As for running XP virtualized in Ubuntu, it depends. I do it using the free VMWare player. It works really well for normal apps, but I don't think it will work so well for the 3d gaming and such. Basically all you need to virtualize XP is RAM and hard drive space. While the virtual machine is running, it will take a large chunk of RAM all for itself (and you can decide how much). You need the disk space to store the virtual disk image file. XP will run slightly slower than if it were installed directly on the machine. How fast really depends more on which virtual machine you choose, and how you have it configured.

am_dragon

Vista home basic runs fine on 512GB of RAM (wells as fine as Vista runs anyway). I bought a laptop for my church, an Acer at WalMart for $350, I was surprised it wasn't that bad. I would recommend a Gig though and it shouldn't cost that much to upgrade even if it's two 256MB sticks and you have to replace both.

I'm pretty sure I have just 512mb of ram. I want to get the 4gb deal CCLonline has and was wondering what kind of specs you need to run XP virtulaized inside Ubuntu.

What Processor, and what do you want to do with XP virtualized? The Core2Duo 1.83GHz T5600 (IIRC) and up have special instruction sets for virtualization. You can actually dedicate one of the cores to the virtualized OS. This will make a huge difference in performance. I know memory will help but I think CPU is going to be the bottleneck when you start running multiple OS's.

Vhdblood

AFAIK, when you get a number like 448mb of ram, it's because you are sharing some to the integrated video. Depending on the age of the laptop, this is most likely the case. Of course, 516mb is very strange, and thus this is more likely to do with Scott's answer.

dopievoli

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How did you manage to get 516 megs of ram?

Corrected, my mistake

Apreche

Oh, I forgot all about the AGP aperture. Yeah, if you are looking at the RAM count in windows, that is going to subtract the RAM being used by the video card. If you have an integrated video card, as most laptops do, then some of your memory is being used for textures and such, and is unavailable to you in Windows. When counting RAM make sure you only look at the count in the BIOS.