Vista memory?

[Si]

Could anyone give me a rough idea of how much more memory you need on a machine cursed with Vista to get it to perform at the same sort of speed as one with XP?  I'm interested in just simple things like starting up/using Word, etc.
Assume the standard cheapo version of both OSs, and similar processors, etc.

My 256meg XP is more than happy to run word, XLS, etc but looking at comments about Vista they seem to think that you need 2gig of memory to use these?  IF I am going to have Vista forced upon me I'd at least like it to be able to do something useful.

[Polar Bear]

Not being a Vista user I cannot comment with authority, but, anecdotally my Bil has an XP laptop, his daughter the same laptop with Vista.  His 1gb memory seems to run XP at elast as fast as her 2gb Vista equivalent.

[pcolbeck]

For XP 512Mb was the minimum for decent speed and 1Gb was the sweet spot (you didn't need more unless you were doing a lot of photo or video work). With Vista you need 2Gb really before it stops crawling.

[cc93]

Yes - 2GB minimum

My machine went from a 1GB tortoise to a 2GB something-a-lot-faster, and memory is pretty cheap now.