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Crucial disses Vista memory footprint

by Steve Kerrison on 5 March 2007, 07:44

Tags: Crucial Technology (NASDAQ:MU)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qah2a

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Here's a bit of an advertising 'ha-ha' for you. It appears that Crucial's suggesting you buy more RAM because Vista likes to use it all up.

While its true that half the time these days, programmers don't seem to care about memory efficiency, is Vista really that bad? Some reckon it's 'bloated', while others say that the final release is actually rather good; it'll use a lot of memory for caching, but only if it's not needed for other stuff.

Crucial's stance is, and we quote: "Vista is memory-hungry". Look, it's right here, in an advertising campaign they're running online:

Memory hungry, eh?

Do we live in a world where hardware is upgraded to meet software requirements, rather than software written to work well on existing hardware? The jury's still out on that, we reckon, and it probably will be for evermore, but Crucial seems fairly sure that if everyone bought more of its RAM, Vista and its users would be happier.

HEXUS Forums :: 21 Comments

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Posted by starbuck - Mon 05 Mar 2007 09:36
every os that has come out in the past few years has always been slated initally as memory hungry and we've always managed to get by somehow with less than the “recommended”.

Problem is, general users will believe the advert and even though some may already have 1-2gig they will think they need more.

I was running the test versions of vista on my current rig(see left) that has what some would consider as an old processor and slow ram. Bearing in mind that the beta versions wouldn't have fully optimised code. Ran fine for me(and I didn't turn all the pretty bits off either).
Posted by kidzer - Mon 05 Mar 2007 11:31
Is there really a problem though, is it not the case (as I read somewhere, if I remember where I shall add the link) that Vista uses all the memory it can, but if another app (say, a game) needs the memory - a fair bit of what Vista uses can be freed because its stuff that can be restarted - like indexing services etc?

Or am I speaking rubbish?

Just read the article infact as I typed this, “it'll use a lot of memory for caching, but only if it's not needed for other stuff.” is similar to what I read, in which case Vista being memory hungry seems a bit of a non-issue tbh.

I ran Vista RC2 on a similar system to starbuck, and again it seemed responsive enough.
Posted by Timmy!!! - Mon 05 Mar 2007 11:32
A company that sells ram is hardly going to say “Vista is incredibly efficient with memory, so if you were thinking of buying some more ram from us… dont bother!”

That would just never happen - they are taking advantage of the situation like any company would, and are trying to sell their product.
Posted by digit - Mon 05 Mar 2007 12:28
Its false advertising though to be honest. They are lying to enable the sale of more of there product. I'm surprised MS haven't taken notice of quite a popular memory producer talking rubbish about its latest OS. 1 gig works fine in most cases, for general usage. Perhaps if the advert had been targetted at gamers I'd not take issue with it.
Posted by DR - Mon 05 Mar 2007 12:50
digit
Its false advertising though to be honest. They are lying to enable the sale of more of there product. I'm surprised MS haven't taken notice of quite a popular memory producer talking rubbish about its latest OS. 1 gig works fine in most cases, for general usage. Perhaps if the advert had been targetted at gamers I'd not take issue with it.

It was on a tech site though - so not exactly targeted at non tech savvy people - more so targeted at Power users

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