2 1/2 G enough ram for Windows 7?

[benali72]

I'm thinking of buying a motherboard + a dual-core AMD cpu.  I already have 2 1/2 G of DDR-2 ram for the board. Is this enough to run Windows 7 reasonably quickly,  or is it on the low-end for allowable ram?

Thanks.

[The Gorn]

It's low end and you will not be very happy. 2 GB seems to be the bare minimum acceptable for Windows XP any more. My wife is running XP with 1 GB and her system is really slow at times.

Most prebuilt PCs and laptops for Vista or Windows 7 seem to have a minimum of 4 GB.

[benali72]

Thanks, G0ddard, that's kind of what I figured.  (Sometimes Hope triumphs over Reason).

Building is fun, but it's more practical to wait until I need to buy a new one, then get whatever is current then.  These days it doesn't cost any more to buy than to build. Thanks.

[jbucks]

I would suggest at least 4Gb RAM.

One of the better choices *I* made when building up my new system was to put the Operating Systems onto a Solid State Drive?  This one change made the most difference in perceived speed to me.

Jim

[johnlynn]

On this laptop here, I have 2GB of ram and Windows 7. It used to have 4GB, but one of the little cards blew so I was stuck with 2GB on Vista, and it was indeed excruciating. So I re-paved and installed Windows 7, and it's been quite pleasant.

I do various things on this machine, I mean I'm not running guest machines or anything, but I can develop in Eclipse and run the Android emulator, and run a database or two (MySQL and/or SQL Server), while playing music with Grooveshark, etc.

I should really replace the missing 2GB though...

[lorb]

I can't wait until "Windows 8" comes out and it takes more than 4GB RAM to run efficiently.  Then, all of those old machines with 32 bit processors will be forced to run Linux.   

[Richardk]

Can you imagine 4 GB of RAM if you just step back and look where we came from? A fully loaded PC had 640K of RAM and you could extend it to 1 MB. Wow, you really had something back then. Plus was it 16 bit at first? And a 10 MB hard drive was huge back then but it still filled up fast.

Today, 4 GB RAM, 64 bit, smoking fast and loads of disk space, but why does it seem kind of slow? Yes, expectations are way up and it does so much more today.

[The Gorn]

I remember a rant I posted to Usenet in late 1994  about ponderous development tools of the time (C++). I noted that soon, all software development will demand at least 16 megabytes.

The sheer horror. 

[Richardk]

GB, that's quite a coincidence since if we establish 1994 with 16 MB as our baseline and then apply Moore's law, guess where we end up? We hit 4 GB in 2010 and 8 GB in 2012. So after nearly two decades, we're right on track. 

Skipping over 'why' software needs so much memory, the correct answer is you can never have too much RAM, so I'd go with at least 4 GB. Since you're building from the ground up anyway I can't see going with less.