Vista - 1Gb hell

thecremeegg · 11 Jan 2008 at 23:57

Right well i'm trying to ascertane which of my memeory sticks is faulty if at all as my games keep locking up so i think some part of my hardware is flaky

Anyways i boot up vista with 1GB and OMG its horrific....constant HDD use, takes ages to load anything. I wanted to try COD4 as thats one of the games that crashes. After ages for it to load, i set it to lowest settings and play a game.....i use the term "play" lightly as I could do anything but! The hard drive was going bananas, constant jerking, so much so it wasnt playable at all.

Why is vista like this? surely it can cope with 1Gb just literally to play cod4 at lowest settings?

Anything I can tweka so that I can actually test the game?

xirokx · 11 Jan 2008 at 23:59

have you tried your RAM in different slots? i.e. tried following where the mobo manual?

also run memtest to help find out if your RAM is faulty...

thecremeegg · 12 Jan 2008 at 00:00

I would run memtest but i cant get it onto a cd - vista is yet again being difficult. I havent tried different slots yet, it took long enough to get it settled down as it is!
I'll try the different slots tomorrow, but memtest is a no go u ntil i can get to another pc!

xirokx · 12 Jan 2008 at 00:28

sorry im confused do you have 2gb but cant use it so are making do with 1gb?

if yes, then sure vista will be a nightmare...

try the mobo manual for RAM configurations, i believe there should only be one way it should be inserted

HangTime · 12 Jan 2008 at 01:12

I think I saw COD4 using up to around 900meg ram on my system, obviously this wasn't on low settings but even so you will be struggling with 1gig. Vista seems to like around 700meg for itself so I think 1.5gig is the bare minimum you can get away with for gaming.

I'd wait until you are back up and running with 2gig before attempting to play modern games.

Caged · 12 Jan 2008 at 02:14

Vista will dump a lot of that 700mb out of RAM though as soon as something else asks for it - it's using it for prefetching.

HangTime · 16 Feb 2008 at 12:02

I'm not sure, I think it is taking 700meg BEFORE superfetch. I.e. it's using 700meg and then another few gig "cached".

Rackerz · 16 Feb 2008 at 12:21

HangTime is correct, generally CoD4 uses 900MB but it can eventually end up using 1.2GB and on Vista with 1GB of RAM it's definitely not enough.

Talrinys · 16 Feb 2008 at 12:42

Disable unneeded services
Disable any programs you don't need
Disable indexing
Disable UAC
Disable any media center stuff

That'll save you some RAM