New computer specs

[jshoes51]

My kids (God bless 'em) pooled their dollars gave me enough money to buy a new laptop for Father's Day. I started looking around, and see that the new operating system is Vista, and it takes 2 gigs of RAM to run.

I have Aspire software, and wonder if it will run okay if I get a laptop with 3 gig of RAM, or if I should spend more $$ and get one with 4 RAM.

My current laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1100 about 7 yrs old running XP Pro with 512 megs of RAM, gets pretty slow at times, especially while running toolpath previews in Aspire.

[tmerrill]

Hi Jim,

Here are the minimum requirements for Aspire from the Vectric website:

"For running Aspire and VCarve Pro 5 we recommend a slightly higher minimum PC specification:

•2 GHz Pentium 4
•Windows Vista with 2Gb RAM
•Windows XP & 2000 with 1Gb RAM
•60 Mb Disk space
•1024 x 768 Graphics display
•DVD Drive"

So your setup with 3 gig of ram will run it OK. But, if you can afford more memory up front, you'll see improved performance. It also helps if you want to have other programs open while you are working with Aspire.

Tim

[lstovall]

You can't have Too Much memory.

[jshoes51]

I generally run Aspire with Firefox open in the background tuned to Pandora radio, and then maybe another browser open if I'm looking for images of Google. Then sometimes I'll print a preview or open an email, and all this usually bogs my current computer down.

[jerry_stanek]

Vista home premium 32 bit will only use 3 gig of ram. The 64 bit version will use more. But there are some programs that will not run on the 64 bit version such as partswizard.