How well Windows 7 running on 1 GB RAM ?

whs said:

Bill2 said:

It'll run slow. The absolute minimum recommended memory for win7 is 1 gb. Right now, on the machine I'm typing on, i have hardly any apps open and about 1.25 gb ram is being consumed. If you plan to run memory intensive apps or a lot of apps at the same time, invest in more ram or a better rig.

I have observed that the RAM usage is a function of the available RAM. In a 1GB system, the usage would be in the 600 to 700MBs. But then, of course, you get more paging activity which slows the system down.

I do agree. In my virtual machine, I allocated 512MB ram to windows 7. It uses around 51% of it when in idle. But atleast, it runs.

Doesn't lag much, it's usable atleast. So, u can try it on 1GB ram but just for casual browsing, song, may be office work too but as the number of windows increases in your tasklbar, so decreases the performance and lag-ness increases. Gaming would be nearly impossible, even light windowes games like Pocket tanks will bog it down.

I use my work machine with Windows 7 32-bit and 1 GB of RAM with a Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz (HT) machine. I have a Radeon HD 4650 in it and with that, it runs decently. With my dual-monitor setup, I've been able to run some older games, can play any HD video thanks to the GPU Acceleration, can run a couple tabs in Firefox and Chrome all with Aero enabled. Said monitors are 17 inch monitors running at 1152 x 864 resolution each. Although some of my colleagues use bigger screens and the machines run decently.

Unlike when Vista was installed on this machine, Windows 7 runs just fine and almost like XP did on it. As far as RAM consumption, Windows will eat almost as much as you can throw at it. The more RAM, the more it eats although there is a cap but you should be fine at 1 GB. 2 GB is far more recommended but you can live with 1 GB if you absolutely have to make do with it, even 1.5 GB.

ARG said:

yepp , i think so.
do you turn on all of the windows 7 features ? ( like aero for example )

Of course! Aero is what you want enabled. Aero will take some of the load off of the CPU by putting most of the UI work onto the GPU. The integrated Intel Graphics is more then enough power for Aero.

I'm also running Ultimate on my netbook, vanilla install all the way.

My system is a 7 year old eMachines T2885, the motherboard has a maximum of 1GB RAM. I'm running the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate and it is faster than Vista in all areas and faster than XP when opening Windows, but slower than XP on startup/shutdown.
All I can say is that if you have at least 1GB RAM and 64MB of video memory, you will be just fine. But if you plan running 64-bit, I recommend having 2GB and a 64-bit Processor, I do plan however to use a formatted HDD to test a 64-bit version on this computer.
Oh, and my netbook is 1GB RAM too, so suck on that to whoever says you need more than 1GB to run 32-bit.

As everyone else said, it will run really slow. I had a hard time running on my original 2GB of RAM. I also ordered my laptop with a 64 Bit OS which sucked the resources but have since put 4GB of RAM in my laptop. If your running a 32Bit Windows 7 I would put at least 2GB and if your running 64Bit I would put at least 3GB in it. But that's me.

70%+ on idle? I think, it'll. Removing gadgets, turning off aero, using a basic theme, using any light AV (or may be a cloud AV) may help reduce the ram usage.
Also, refrain from using firefox for browsing if you do, it consumes a lot of memory. Either use the portable version of it or switch to another browser.