During our Vista testing we wanted to find out how much memory Vista Aero glass needs to work. For each Vista Aero window you need some memory and the numbers are not a joke. We are talking about two to five MB of memory for each window and the amount of memory needed is directly related to the size of the windows.
We found one interesting side effect during our test. Windows
Vista Premium Home edition and Ultimate edition are restricted to 52 Aero glass
windows, without Aero you have couple windows more.
We are
running Vista with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz,
Intel DG965OT motherboard with X3000 great
integrated graphics core on Seagate Barracuda 750 ES hard drive. The tested
machine had 1GB or 2GB system memory. The size of shared memory changed from
256MB to 384MB, depending on if you are using 1GB or 2GB of system memory.
Whatever you do, no matter how good is your hardware the limitation of 52
windows stays.
We
continued the experiment with one of the best cards around, 8800GTS. After
couple minutes we saw the same number, 52. So problem is not Intel integrated
graphic related it is VIsta OS issue.
We could not pass 52 windows and after 51st
one you have to kill the process or
two to keep it usable. You can not do anything with your PC, it’s overloaded and only way to keep the
machine alive is to close one or more opened windows.
After all hard work all we can recommend is that we hope you won’t run more than 52 windows in the same time. Silly isn’t it.