Why on earth would anyone want to run Vista Office with only 128 MBs of RAM ? George Ou at ZDnet says that Web-based word processors like ThinkFree Office makes computers slow down as it hogs memory resources like a worm. Well, I think web based softwares using Ajax is something that will stay for awhile as most companies are trying hard to make sure staff don’t simply install illegal software on their PCs.

The moral of the story : Get more RAM. Its cheaper than gold now and 1GB seems so passe.

Google’s newly acquired Writely should hardly be considered a replacement for Microsoft Office, Word Perfect, OpenOffice.org Write, or any other rich client. The only Web-based word processor or Office Suite that comes close to something like Microsoft Office is ThinkFree Office which is written in Java. But ThinkFree Office makes resource-hogging OpenOffice.org look good by comparison. Just the word processor alone with no data loaded eats up 100 MBs of RAM. Loading up the spread sheet and presentation software will cost you another 200 MBs of RAM. Oh and if you actually want some data with that, you better prepare a Gigabyte of RAM. Vista on the other hand will run on a computer with 128 MBs of RAM (without any Aero Glass eye candy).

Truth is: Web Office takes more resources than Vista source