I’m running Vista 64 on my XPS 700 720 and I just upgraded from 2 GB RAM to 4 GB of 800 MHz dual channel DDR2 ram.  My system was running slowly (it’s a Microsoft Operating System).

The RAM even came with heat sinks.   After the upgrade my system does perform nicely and I have much less disk thrashing.  But Vista is a pig.  Even running idle and having only Firefox or Internet Explorer, the system is using more than 1 GB of RAM.  That’s just nuts.

This is one reason why people should stick with XP.  With every iteration of Windows you get an even more hungry monster for very little benefit.  I’m glad I moved to Vista but that’s because I have a character defect.  I like working with broken and difficult systems.

I went with the 64 bit version because I was sure I’d run application that could use the RAM.  With a 32 bit Microsoft OS you get a actual limit of somewhere between 2 and 3 GB’s.  It’s an addressing issue and the fix is to go 64 bit.