Vista and RAM

Here's a quick update on my experience with the Toshiba Satellite Pro L300 after a month. It's a fine laptop... not perfect, but for its low asking price, it's hard to complain. In my usage I found that the screen could be sturdier, the battery life better, and the system, faster.

It came with 1GB RAM, and that's anything but enough for Vista.


I bought a 2GB SD card and used it for ReadyBoost, which didn't give dramatic performance improvements, and also upgrade to 2GB RAM, which gave an INSTANT, noticeable performance hike. It also did push the WEI sub-score for RAM from 4.5 to 4.8, and the graphics sub-score from 3.0 to 3.5. Still, I hesitate running Aero on such laptops.


With 2GB RAM, Vista now breathes much better, and finally I can really multi-task reasonably OK (like running Photoshop, iTunes and Office simultaneously). Lesson learnt: if you're running Vista, you would want to have AT LEAST 2GB RAM!