New
#11
I have one machine that runs w7 professional 64bit version on 2GB with no problems whatsoever. It's not the fastest machine on the planet, but it's a lot faster than most new machines that are full of factory installed bloat.
38 processes seems about right when running a 2.4Ghz core 2 & 2GB RAM. My z800 is just about as responsive with over 100 running processes. I think the idea is to find a good balance for the hardware you're running. Manufacturers ought to be shot for some of the factory setups I've seen.
On this desktop system, I have a 2.5GHz duo core with 3GBs of RAM and absolutely no performance problems since I use an 80GB Intel SSD for the OS. That is always the first thing I do with a new system, install a SSD (even on my laptops). That makes a world of difference for performance. Only things like video editing where you depend a lot on the CPU and GPU are not as swift than on a system with more muscle. I can notice the difference when I use my quad cores with 1GB GPUs.
If you're into video editing you'd love the machine I'm using right now. I can convert 1 1/2 hours of raw video to DVD format in about 6 minutes.
To the OP: try doing what I did. go into the startup tab of MSCONFIG and uncheck everything there except for drivers and your AV software. Nothing else needs to run when windows starts in order to work when you need it.
You made me curious. What machine is that. I use Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 to convert captured screen videos from .xesc format to .wmv format. And that takes quite some time (2 passes) even with my i7, 1GB GPU, 4GB RAM and the OCZ Vertex2 SSD.you'd love the machine I'm using right now
As others have said, with a 64-bit operating system, getting to at least 4GB of ram seems very worthwhile..especially considering how cheap RAM is these days. With Windows 7, it's not that advantageous to have gobs of ram just sitting idle. Might as well use everything you can. As long as it shows as "available", means that Windows will clear it and use it for other things when it's needed.