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Comment by lhorn | Hacker News Reader

The review hasn't addressed the most important question: will it run smoothly on 512MB of RAM, the maximum I'm willing to give it under VirtualBox.

Currently I often run two instances of XP with about 300MB RAM each and they're quite fast. Vista was built with an assumption that everybody has at least 2GB with half of that going to Vista itself and another half - to Internet Explorer. I hope they learned that some users have a lot less RAM and they like running other software too.

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At PDC today during the keynote, they said they were running the current builds (which are not completely optimized yet) on netbooks with 1GB of RAM without issues. It's not exactly what you want, but its a step in that direction and it may get there.

I'd like to see Apple address that too in Snow Leopard - Leopard runs like a dog under VMWare which makes cross-platform development a pain.

How do you manage to run Leopard in VMware?

I visited piratebay and used a pre cooked image

I also want to know this. Is there a magical hacked os x that runs under virtualization?

The license for OS X Server lets you run it virtualized. I don't remember if they have actually released the products yet, and I'm too lazy to look, but both Parallels and Vmware have been working on it.

I doubt they care that much. Even the real low end computers from Dell (~$300) ship with 2GB of RAM now.

Well... the cheapest notebook from Dell is actually much closer to $400. It has exactly 512MB of RAM. And it does not run Windows, it runs Ubuntu. They better care about that.

Yeah, they have the mini notebooks that are pretty underpowered for that price. However, the regular 15" notebooks are about $500 and ship with 2GB of RAM. Its also worth noting none of the mini notebooks even ship with Vista (Ubuntu or XP are your options).

As long as Windows 7 runs well on 2GB most people won't care. One of the reasons vista reception was so poor was that 1GB RAM simply didn't cut it, but that's what every low end PC shipped with.

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