Windows vista was very resource hungry compared to xp. will win 7 be the same as vista or will it be improved.
First, yes Vista and Win7 takes more RAM. Second, it's mostly due of: Because what "takes" and takes (I'll explain) the most RAM was the fact that everything is in your RAM, instead of your HDD (switching from pagefile on your HDD to your RAM and vise versa, as XP acts liek if you are low memeory. Idel solution for when XP (and older) was release with 128, 256, 512MB of RAM... not so much at 1GB and above) like under XP, even the kernel is always on the RAM in Vista/Win7. Another thing, is that Vista/Win7 has superfetch. This technology watches your memory and monitor what data goes in at what time link to software you run. And then preloads it before you do next time, to make your software start much faster than XP, as it's been pre-loaded onto memory. The memory it takes is not reserved. It will free it, if you need it, and that is before it uses the page file on your HDD. That is why I said takes in quotes.. as it doesn't really takes. Works quiet well. In Win7 there were some memory management improvement making teh OS like small memory footprint (under 2 GB of RAM) compared to Vista where you basically NEED 2GB to have a smooth experience.
If you're worried about running 7 with a small amount of memory then I'd say there's no real need to worry. I ran the RC on just 512MB of memory and it ran faster than XP did on that computer. Hope that helps in some way. Ross