Some guidance needed

[whoisjohngalt]

An older laptop was handed down to me:
Sony Vaio P4 2.8Ghz 512mb of RAM

It originally had shipped with windows XP. Since i really didn’t want to spend money on it, the RAM was kept at 512, and I had partitioned the drive into and put windows server 2003 on one partition and windows 7 on the other. W2K3 tend to run much better because of the lower RAM over head, and not surprising windows 7 was an exercise in memory page-outs.

Now I’m thinking about replacing windows 7 with W2k8.

Does any one know if, given the amount of RAM I have and the paging out experience with windows 7, would w2k8 be a waste of my time?

[fredcadet]

I can tell you from experience is that it’s usually best to stick with the OS or OS equivalent that the system was made for but there is always room to learn. ws2k8 will use less memory then w7 but still a big chunk more than ws2k3. By default Windows server OS’es usually use less memory than their desktop counterparts and with that sometimes faster too depending on what you have running.

I have gotten windows server 2008 to run with 256mb ram in safe mode once just to see if it would boot with that small amount. It will only in safe mode. I have a feeling it will safemode boot with even less ram but I have not tested it to be sure.

As a cheatsheet to windows desktop and server OS’es and their counterparts are:

Windows XP — Windows Server 2003R2
Windows Vista — Windows Server 2008
Windows 7 — Windows Server 2008R2

Their activation technology is counter as well as their desktop experience. The bare server will use less ram without the desktop experience.

[halladayrules]

I had ran Server 2008 on a Sony Vaio P4 2.8Ghz w/HT that came with only 512MB pre-installed memory and I can tell you from experience that it is not a very practical desktop replacement. Try treating your scenario as if you wanted to become a server. Let’s say a simple FTP server and thats it. You turn on the machine, boot it up, log in and let your FTP server run. Now how much user interaction will this FTP server require? Not very much. Are you going to need more than 512MB of RAM? Probably not. Now take a look at the minimum memory requirements for Server 2008’s desktop counterpart – Vista Home Premium. They recommend a minimum of 1GB. As you can see with all the added features (media playback, aero, web surfing, multimedia, multitasking, etc, etc) that 512MB is not suitable enough for these tasks. There would be too much disk activity caused by paging as you experienced with Windows 7. I’m running Server 2008 on my Dell laptop with only 1.5GB of RAM and Intel Core 2 Duo, and its using around 420MB on startup, it never exceeds the 512MB when idling, and it usually uses around 700MB to 800MB when i am running internet applications, wmplayer, etc basic programs that i use frequently. My personal recommendation would be not to run server 2008 as a desktop replacement until you have atleast 1GB of RAM. Anything less is just not practical.

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