Re: Vista memory usage:
What's the point of having 2GB of RAM if it's mostly unused and the OS swaps stuff to disk heavily? Point is that RAM should be consumed before the OS even begins to swap to disk; WinXP doesn't understand this and typically starts swapping after about 100MB of user apps are in memory. Even on a 2GB system.
Yes, the Vista OS itself is rather bloated and the system caches are very large, but I don't see this as much of a problem. Games are probably going to start demanding 3 or 4GB of main RAM in the next year or two, Vista regardless.
Large system caches mean less disk access, which unless you have a RAID setup with the mother of all onboard caches, is widening a serious bottleneck in the PC architecture.
I'm not sure what gives the greater performance boost: aggressive caching or reduced swapping. With a sensible algorithm for determining the memory pages to swap, it is very possible that Vista could support more memory-intensive apps at once than XP ever could, with no performance decrease.
After all, how many apps besides games (and server apps, but that's not the topic) are actually going to push memory consumption above a gigabyte? I'd rather require 2GB to support a system that's using all of it than require 2GB because the OS is wasting most of it.
