Eug
Lifer
- Mar 11, 2000
- 23,807
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2GB of RAM is absolutely no problem for Windows 7. There's certainly no need to disable Aero etc. One of my spare machines has 2GB of RAM and Windows 7 x64 installed, and it's very responsive (with Crucial M4) and a perfectly competent system for general office use. Idle RAM usage sits at ~700MB with Avast installed. Remember that Windows uses spare RAM for Superfetch. You might look at your idle RAM usage on a 4GB machine and see 1.5GB used, but that's not indicative of the RAM overhead of Windows 7 itself. It will scale it's prefetching depending on available memory.
On 2 GB, Windows 7 runs fine if you want to run a very limited number of applications at a time. But even if you run a couple of browser windows and several tabs plus a few more applications it really starts to bog down with 2 GB of RAM. That's why I said earlier that 4 GB is the low end PC sweet spot. This is even more true, if you have integrated graphics, which uses up a portion of that RAM.
After trying to run my low-end machines with two gig ram, I eventually upgraded them to 3 or 4 GB for increased performance.