Had my second run on that new Dell laptop this evening, setting up a wireless net connection for a friend. Have to say – the thing EATS RAM and the machine is quite sluggish in its performance. Of course I’m smiling as I’m sitting in front of a MacBook Pro, but thats another matter altogether. Its a wonder why Dell allow their Vista machines to be shipped with a half gig of RAM, or they should at least carry a warning at the ordering stage that 512mb RAM can seriously damage your health (out of frustration or lack of patience).

I’ve an RC1 copy of Vista running on my own machine, 1GB DDR2 behind it (2×512) and there’s never a been a performance issue. Even with everything now stripped out on the laptop (AVG is the only addition to memory-resident processes) it still performs like its been drinking for the day. Tip of the week – fork out for that extra 512mb RAM, if not more.