windows 7 running on 512 ram help.

sounds like you have something else going on if the computer is shutting down this would not be caused by lack of ram.

I have ran 7 on 768 megs in a laptop with a single core 1.6 Ghz CPU and it wasn't to bad

the best way to quickly speed things up is by disabling unneeded programs and services that load with windows followed by turning off extra eye candy

the real problem is that as you know your system shouldn't be running windows 7, i'd wager with only 512 ram most if not all of your components are below the recommended minimum. also consider the stuff removed from the orginal ISO, your computer simply isn't going to run stably for long periods of time. now you could potentially make it better, try installing a low resource alternative shell like emerge desktop, turning off any and all features you don't need will also help and i suppose ready boost will too but remember it's not a replacement for ram, what it does is moves the cache that would normally be on your hard disk to the faster flash based memory. also contrary to what you may hear elsewhere it can only use up to 4gb per flash drive, this is actually i limitation of both the 32 and 64 bit versions that many people do not realize and i believe windows will actually report back that it does use more on larger drives but that is false.

pparks1 said:

I believe when the OP comes back, you will find that he is running Windows 7 as a virtual machine with 512MB of RAM...this from other chats and PM's that I have had with him.

and it's shutting down his actual computer or just the VM?

Tested HP 510 laptop with 512mb: can run Win7 for light websurfing, Works, 1-2 gadgets, but no AV - even one as lean as Avast. Can not multi-task more than 1-2 tasks at a time.

Even this much performance requires turning off most visual effects & indexing.