If you’ve read this blog any recently, you’ll remember I bought a new laptop with Vista as the OS (operating system) on it. Well, the laptop in itself is great! I love the look and feel of it and the keyboard layout works well for my hands. I’m using it mostly for my projects plus a few games and I was enjoying using it even with Vista’s annoyances. Until lately that is.

The Toshiba has 2 gigs of memory from the factory installed and is the same amount I have on my desktop machine that runs both Ubuntu and XP Pro. Thing is, the laptop will nearly run out of memory while running Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Notepad++ along with having some open windows for searching for images, docs, etc.

I’ll get a warning box telling me that Vista is low on memory and I need to save then close any open applications. That’s a load for Vista? I never get this on my desktop and I’ve had way more apps and windows running on it no matter if I’m in Ubuntu or XP!

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, right now as I type this…Vista’s memory is hovering right around the half-way mark. All I have open is Firefox and Google’s desktop app. That’s it.

If this is M/S’s progress, I’d rather stick with XP instead. I guess I’ll have to upgrade the memory to run Vista or maybe wipe it and install XP Pro on it instead.

I’d rather see M/S build something that works as it’s hyped to work. Not this wheezing, memory lacking excuse for an OS. I’m glad Ubuntu runs as good as it does.

Mr. Ballmer, would you please ask your engineers to work on this?

Yeah, right.

Update:

Found a place to buy a 2 gig stick to upgrade the memory for now. We’ll see how increasing the RAM to 3 gigs will affect things and go from there. The company I found is called 1rstChoiceMemory.

2nd Update 4/11/08:

The added memory has helped with the apps I run on Windows so maybe this will do for a while longer. Still though, deactivating most of the memory hogging junk in Vista also helped in increasing the memory resources.

It just makes me wonder why Microsoft would even release such a bloated OS that saps resources so relentlessly and actually has the nads to call it great. Geez, maybe they ought to just stick to buying software and sticking their name on it.