Vista Ultimate uses more ram?

N

NetTechie

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 10, 2014
Messages
251
I had vista home edition on my laptop, but the disc doesn't work to restore it. So I installed one of my unused copies of Vista Ultimate (retail) and it's running out of ram constantly now. I disabled the nice vista skin, that helped, but what in the heck? I mean it's the same computer as before, now it constantly crashes. Is there some service that is using ram on Ultimate that I could disable? I see I'm using about 800mb of the 2gb of ram on this computer, right at boot. No idea how much ram home edition was using at boot though.
 
Did you download and install SP2 for Vista? I remember a while back that this was an issue that SP2 was supposed to clear up.
 
NetTechie said:
I mean it's the same computer as before, now it constantly crashes.
Click to expand...

Can you give more info on the crashes? Are you getting a blue screen with a specific error code? Running out of memory shouldn't cause the computer to crash, it should just use more and more virtual memory as it gets slower and slower. Do you have your pagefile disabled?

Not sure about Vista Ultimate, but I have put 7 Ultimate on a number of computers that only have 2GB of RAM and it has not been in a problem in any of those cases.
 
Application crashes. I used to use firefox, but gave up on it as it would cause me to run out of ram quick! So I switched to Chrome. First the page crashes, so I know I'm close to chrome crashing. The message is something like "oh snap! your tab has crashed, reload". Then I get a windows message "the program has to close" saying something about an error (no code). I also get messages that pop up first saying "you are running low on ram, close the program" which means it would close chrome. I hit cancel, then after a while I start getting a message that says "you are running out of ram" and an Ok button, no option to close the program. When I check the amount of ram used it's usually like 1.7gb so it's almost out of ram. I might add I have maybe 5 tabs open at this point (I don't have a lot of tabs open typically). Facebook, Hotmail, YouTube, and eBay are my typical first four tabs (all logged in), then the rest are whatever I'm doing on the web.

My paging file is system managed. I was thinking maybe increase it manually, it's currently setting it to 4gb. I can tolerate slow... if it goes slow I don't care, crashing means I have to relaunch everything which is annoying.

Both my licenses for Windows 7 Ultimate retail are currently in use on my newer computers. I'd try it but they are pricey.
 
Last edited:
Hm, no real ideas then. Have you tried a memtest to see if the RAM is okay?
 
It was working fine with Vista Home and then hours later I had installed Ultimate and had the issues. I doubt the ram is at fault, though I could check.
 
I have Vista Ultimate, I had quite a bit of trouble getting it to update to the sp1 or sp2 version, it didn't seem to want to from windows update.
I had to download the manual updaters.

I assume you checked the main service pack updates actually installed properly?

ie. computer > properties.

You probably did but just suggesting one possibility.
 
Last edited:
NetTechie said:
It was working fine with Vista Home and then hours later I had installed Ultimate and had the issues. I doubt the ram is at fault, though I could check.
Click to expand...


Did you check the virtual memory settings?
 
What is the RAM usage at idle in task manager? Does anything besides web browers crash?
 
Can you see what is causing the high memory usage? My dad's laptop started acting sluggishly, checked task manager and a svchost.exe was using large amounts of memory. Ran malwarebytes, found a few malware. Quarantined those and problems went away.
 
[U]ber|Noob;1041489393 said:
I have Vista Ultimate, I had quite a bit of trouble getting it to update to the sp1 or sp2 version, it didn't seem to want to from windows update.
I had to download the manual updaters.

I assume you checked the main service pack updates actually installed properly?

ie. computer > properties.

You probably did but just suggesting one possibility.
Click to expand...
So much this. I kept the standalone packages for SP1 and SP2 on a thumbstick while I was still using Vista for this reason (for some reason I couldn't get a slipstream disc to work).
 
Am I the only one who found it strange this is a new thread in 2015?
 
Well, from a financial standpoint I can afford it, they go for a lot less than Windows 7 on ebay in the retail ultimate edition (which can be used on business / server domain controller networks).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top