Windows Vista: The 256 Experience

Windows Vista officially supports on 512 MB of RAM or higher. The setup itself stops you from installing without the necessary amount of RAM. But fortunately this can be bypassed using a certain crack.

I am currently working on a friend's laptop, on which he wanted Windows Vista to be installed. But its RAM and Graphics are nothing much to be spoken about. 256 MB of RAM definitely did not appeal to the Windows Vista Setup program, so I cracked the setup. Next time it did work.

Almost everything on the internet warned that using Vista on 256 MB of RAM was very foolish, and would be fruitless. But I used to run Vista with 512 MB of RAM on my own computer some time ago, and it worked very well! So I beleived that Windows Vista could run on 256 MB at a reasonable speed as well.

Setup
First I reformatted the computer and installed Windows XP. Then I copied the Vista setup files to the computer and cracked it to work with 256 MB of RAM.

The setup ran at the speed I was used to. Took about 45 minutes to complete. No problems whatsoever. I was very pleased.

First Startup
The "Welcome" screen appeared and stayed on for about 30 seconds. Next it loaded the desktop. Although the system could now be used, it was loading stuff in the background for about 5 minutes, and everything was slow. After that, everything ran smoothly and without any system errors.

Boosting the Speed
The Speed of Vista greatly depends on the Processor and RAM. The processor, in this case, was a Intel Celeron M with a 1.3 GHz clock speed. The RAM was, of course, only 256 MB. So one way to speed up was to increase the RAM.

I could not waste money on buying new RAM for the laptop. Instead, I used Vista's new and powerful feature named "Windows ReadyBoost".

What does it do? It uses a USB Flash Drive (min. 64 MB of free space) as extra RAM. So I plugged in completely empty 256 MB Flash Drive and enabled ReadyBoost. Voila! The system sped up like I never expected.

Tweaking
Actually, so far I have not done any tweaking to the computer. The current speed of Vista on the laptop is satisfactory. Maybe I will get on to it later.

Gaming
This too I have yet to test. The graphics card itself if not very powerful, but games like Grand Theft Auto used to work earlier on XP. So now I must see how it works on Vista.

I will update this blog post with my future experiences with Windows Vista on my friend's low RAM laptop. For now, I am pleasantly surprised on Vista's performance.