Marquzz wrote:I agree with that. Felt the difference when going from 16 to 24MB in Win98. Going over 24 i don't think that I would notice sinc […]
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Scali wrote:In my experience, Windows 95 runs fine with 8-16 MB, Windows 98SE runs fine with 16+ MB.
Windows NT4 is fine with 32-64 MB.
Then […]
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386SX wrote:Probably in the W98 world ram benefit would certainly be felt after upgrading but I also had some delusions about it. I remember the K62-350 from 64MB to 128MB... or also the same 386SX from 1MB to 4MB...
In my experience, Windows 95 runs fine with 8-16 MB, Windows 98SE runs fine with 16+ MB.
Windows NT4 is fine with 32-64 MB.
Then there's a huge leap forward. Win2000/XP want 256-512 MB to work acceptably. I tried running Win2000 on my P133 with 64 MB once... BAD idea 😀
And with Vista you probably don't want less than 2 GB. But then it sorta stabilized. Win7 is doable with 2-3 GB, and Win8/10 actually are more efficient with memory than Win7, because of the tablet-optimizations. They work better with 2 GB than Win7 did.
I agree with that. Felt the difference when going from 16 to 24MB in Win98. Going over 24 i don't think that I would notice since it was very smooth with 24.
Minimum for Win7 is 4GB I would say, even at 4GB it's kinda struggling when running several programs. As for Win 8/10 I haven't tried below 8GB myself, but as you say, they seems fine with 2GB, even though cheap tablets are sold with only 1GB. I think they did an really good job since minimun on Android is 2GB (imo) also.
Beforce switching to Win7 I ran WinXP 64 bit with 4GB 😀
Windows 7+ is fine with 2GB if you use the 32-bit versions (personal experience), but do not go multitasking/multitabbing-crazy. For 64-bit versions you do need 4GB to run well (and for going 64-bit to even be justified), and more is always welcome.
Back in the day I ran Windows 2000 SP4 on a Duron 1200 + 160MB of RAM and it ran just fine. I also ran Windows XP/2K on a P3 + 128GB (later upgraded to 256). I remember 2K SP4 was just fine with 160MB as my daily driver, and I even played some games on that machine. 128MB was also fine on Windows 2K RTM, but a while later when I went XP SP1 it wasn't as snappy - but good enough, and I didn't even tweak it (disabling services, etc.). By the end of its life as a daily driver, 256MB was snappy with Windows XP... until you installed a then-modern anti-virus. Then things started to slow down a bit - but still decent. It was web browsing that killed everything though... Back in the day I was browsing god knows how many tabs with now-old then-current Mozilla versions and 160MB - less multimedia stuff and simpler web pages - years later even with 256MB + Firefox 4+ the system was paging all the time. Even, much later, my Athlon 64 3000+ with Windows XP was getting dragged down with only 512MB, even though it was plenty of memory when I bought it with the very same OS (Windows XP... but probably SP2 rather than SP3 - not that SP3 increased memory usage anyway). Windows itself wasn't using much memory - it was, again, anti-viruses and web browsers that bloated the requirements up.
The same thing, but in a smaller scale, happened with 98SE. We say 32MB is fine for Windows 98 today, but back when it was my daily driver it did like more memory when I threw it at it. My Cyrix MII PR333 came with 32MB, which was fine when my mother bought it, but a while later it started dragging it down. Things did improve when we added a 128MB stick (the 160MB that the Duron inherited later), not when just using Windows, but when multitasking and/or browsing the internet.
Back to the topic - I never had a 486 back in the day (I do have one now \o/), and my oldest PC was a Pentium MMX 233MHz. It came with 16MB of RAM, but that was already not much when we bought it, and my dad almost immediately upgraded to 24MB. The machine also went from Windows 95 to Windows 98 as soon as he upgraded... I barely remember that machine before the upgrade... I don't think he waited a month before adding more memory.
