Is it preferable to upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista
 

Hey
I'm currently with Vista Ultimate in my 32bit Desktop. I have only 1GB Ram with out any ram upgrading option. Do you think there will be a performance drop if I upgrade to Windows 7? I heard 7 handle ram better than vista. But i have this doubt due I'm with the minimum required ram.

1 gig of ram sucks on vista big time. That will be tolerable on 7 but I honestly recommend upgrading your ram to at least 2 gigs. It shouldn't cost you too much and it'll really help. You really shouldn't be using vista or 7 without a minimum of 2 gigs of ram in my opinion.

It's hard to say if an upgrade is really going to improve performance. Upgrading will carry over your files and all that and along with all your junk and things that could be slowing your system down. I like starting off fresh be backing up my data off the harddrive and formatting everything clean. That way I'm not dragging corpses around on my system drive.

Win7 has somewhat lower base ram usage, but both 7 and Vista scales up ram usage if you have more ram. So, just because Vista idles at 1,2 gigs in a 2gb setup, you don't actually need 2gb minimum for it to do anything.

I've used Vista with 1gb ram, back in the pre-sp1 days, and it worked just fine. Of course I had problems when I tried loading apps that alone took 1gb ram (most modern games), but the base OS itself run beautifully well, and so did most other apps (webbrowsers, etc).

Hell, I dare say that Vista would run fine on 512mb as well. Unlike XP, the minimum RAM requirement of the OS is not the one where it boots in half hour, but the one that the OS actually uses, with headroom for a few apps.