which is easier on ram because im thinking of upgrading to 7 from vista and i need to know how much better w7 is!
In my experience Vista was always using just over 1GB sat idle on the desktop where as W7 uses about 780Mb sat idle. If I were you I would definitely upgrade, its nice and stable and is much faster than Vista.
and user account control 88) can be kept on without driving you insane.
Yes, When I tried Windows 7 in a VM with nothing else installed, It used around 300-400mb RAM. I have seen Vista using a lot of RAM.
Windows 7 is much faster than Vista!
Does anyone think i should format my and restore from partition before win 7 install
In my experience, a clean install is always the best way to go
Start from scratch is my suggestion.
Windows 7 is more fast and stable than Vista in my machine.
Ditto. 
Win 7 uses less RAM than Vista.
Cheer up for Windows 7.
But I like Vista OS-Tan more than Windows 7 tan. 88)
I must say I prefer the Win 7 GUI over the Vista GUI. I liked the Vista look at the time and liked it better than the XP look.
:-TU The same for me. I was impressed when I first saw Vista, and more so when I saw 7.
I took the above screenshot just moments ago showing my Win 7 x64 desktop using 1.72 GB of RAM at idle with no programs running which is quite typical just over 16 minutes after it was restarted. To be fair if I shut the computer down and start it the next morning it will boot to the desktop at between 960 MB and 1 GB of RAM.
This is a digital photograph I took of the Task Manager my Vista x86 laptop about 1 and 1/2 hours after I booted it up as it was using 435 MB of RAM. I have run Vista most every day for the last 2 1/2 years and I found the Vista OS to indeed use more RAM starting to the desktop than Win 2000 which I have found uses ~200 MB of RAM or Win XP which typically uses ~250 MB of RAM, but in my experience Vista uses only a small fraction of the RAM that Win 7 requires which routinely takes ~1 GB to boot up and goes on to use 4X more RAM to run than my Vista RTM SP0 x86 operating system, but one must have a working knowledge of how to deal with the memory leaks in Vista in order to be able to capitalize on its ability to perform the same functions as Win 7 while using 1/4 as much RAM allocation.
The overwhelmingly predominant opinion among observers or casual users of Vista is that it is a memory hog, but with some effort and dedication Vista reveals Win 7 to be the true memory hog. For those who are of a different opinion I challenge anyone to produce a screenshot of a Win 7 computer using less than 435 MB of RAM 90 minutes into an actual session and not in a VM with a 20 MB allowance if a screen capture tool is used at low RAM levels making the benchmark for Win 7 to beat 455 MB to be just equal with Vista in terms of RAM usage.
~Maxx~
PS- Just for the record my MemInfo system tray tool has measured Vista as low as 416 MB of RAM use, but it is only fair to stick with Task Manager screenshots.
