May 9th, 2007

Vista Home Basic on 512MB? Hey, it works!

Posted by Ed Bott @ 2:38 pm

Categories: Windows Vista

Tags: Microsoft Windows Vista, RAM, Ed Bott

Everyone knows Windows Vista is a resource hog. Everyone says it doesn’t even get out of first gear without a gigabyte of RAM, and it takes 2 GB before it stops stuttering and stammering with each mouse click. Everyone says Vista Home Basic is the black sheep of the family, deserving only of a sideways glance and a dismissive harrumph. That’s what I keep reading on the Internet, so it must be true.

Which is why I had steeled myself for pitiful performance when I yanked all but 512MB out of my test system last week and downgraded to Vista Home Basic. With a 2002–vintage CPU and Microsoft’s minimum recommended RAM, running the most basic of Vista retail editions on a 30GB partition, surely this would be a painful experience.

Or not.

You shouldn’t believe everything you read. I was expecting to need Valium and vodka and an on-call therapist to handle Vista Home Basic on this low-end system. Instead, I found a snappy, responsive OS that did everything I asked of it.

My primary goal was to measure startup times, answering skeptics who thought my test results from a few weeks ago were skewed by the expansive 1.5GB of RAM on this ancient P4 test machine. So I pulled out all but one stick of RAM and prepared for the worst. All you Vista bashers will be disappointed to hear what happened next:

• The system booted two seconds faster than it had with all that extra RAM. On average, Vista’s boot time was less than 30 seconds.
• Menus popped up instantly, with no lag or delay.
• My favorite DVD, Blade Runner, played flawlessly at full resolution, in surround sound. (I had to install a DVD decoder first – Vista Home Basic doesn’t include DVD playback capabilities out of the box.)
• I was able to rip a CD, check my Google Mail account on Mozilla Thunderbird, and play a full-screen slide show, all at the same time, without a single skip or hiccup. [Update: Since this seems to have confused some commenters, let me explain: I started ripping a CD, then opened Thunderbird and told it to begin downloading messages from my GMail account, and finally started a slideshow. In this case, checking e-mail was a background process. This particular account had more than 50 messages to download, including several large photo attachments.]
• Even installing Norton Antivirus 2007 couldn’t slow things down. The Norton software added 7 seconds to my startup time, but after it loaded, everything worked exactly as expected.

To be fair, I didn’t do anything I knew would have brought this system to its knees. I didn’t try to rip a DVD, decode the human genome, or run Office 2007. But still… I’d have no qualms about handing this system over to my mom, my brother, or my best friend.

On the Windows Experience Index, this system rates a 2.0, thanks to its sluggish RAM (and even when I put those two extra 512MB sticks of RAM back in, the number doesn’t budge). The CPU on this system earned a 3.8. By contrast, Intel’s bottom-of-the-line 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo T5200, standard on every $599 notebook PC these days, rates a 4.3.

Surprisingly, even the visuals on this system were a treat. With a three-year-old video card, this system was capable of running Vista’s Aero graphics. But because Aero doesn’t run on Home Basic, I was stuck with the Vista Standard display. It lacks the transparent window borders and whizzy live previews on taskbar buttons, but otherwise the look is indistinguishable from a system running Windows Vista Ultimate.

The conventional wisdom says Vista Home Basic is a dog, and that it slows to a crawl with 512MB. Don’t believe everything you read.