Will I notice the drop in memory related performance if I downgrade my OS?

md99 · 4 Jan 2009 at 22:01

Hi folks,

I'm running Vista 64 and following a rather unfortunate incident with a piece of f*!@ing software I downloaded from a torrent site I have no choice but to do a complete reformat of my hard drive :mad:

Thing is though, I'm not that keen on Vista anyway. I only installed it as I went from 2 to 4 gigs of ram after my last hardware upgrade and am toying with the idea of going back to XP when I reformat.

I don't really stress my PC, I play games (not stuff like Crysis) at high settings and occasionally watch the odd BR movie on it so was wondering if I'll notice the drop from the 4gb of ram utilized by Vista to the 3.25 gigs which I think will only be available after the switch to XP.

Thanks.

95thrifles · 4 Jan 2009 at 22:26

No I wouldnt say so, although the XP can only see 3-3.5 gig of RAM, it uses less system memory itself so should be on par performance wise

Wayne~ · 4 Jan 2009 at 22:30

XP uses less RAM as is older so highly doubtful

md99 · 4 Jan 2009 at 23:18

Totally forgot about XP using less ram.

And good bloody riddance Vista in that case.

Richie P · 5 Jan 2009 at 01:26

XP doesn't use RAM like Vista, so you'll notice it using less but that doesn't necessarily make it better (Vista uses RAM rather than letting it sit idle doing nothing).

I use XP on my laptop for performance reasons (Pentium M 2.Ghz and 1GB DDR), but I couldn't go back to XP on my desktop (E8600+4GB DDR3).