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Increasing RAM... benefits? drawbacks?

Discussion in 'PC Hardware' started by James, 2005/08/24.

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  1. 2005/08/24
    James

    James Inactive Thread Starter

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    Currently I have 512 MB. The maximum allowd is 1 GB (184 pin, DDR1-333 SDRAM). The base processor is AMD Athlon(B) XP 3200 and the speed is 2.20 GHz (Advanced 400 MHz front side bus). The motherboard (if this matters) is: ASUS: A7V8Z-LA.

    Question: would upgrading to the maximum RAM increase the speed of operation noticeably to justify the $80 price?

    I'm not a gamer (just Free Cell I'm afraid). I do like to work with my digital images and generally have three or four windows open at the same time. But that's about it.

    Thanks.
     
  2. 2005/08/24
    ReggieB

    ReggieB Inactive Alumni

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    The degree of benefit depends upon your RAM usage. If you don't use much then you might not see a lot of improvement. Where adding RAM makes a big difference is if you are using more memory than you have physical RAM. In this situation the system uses the hard disk as RAM space. This is slow and makes a big impact on the performance.

    So use the task manager (in NT4, W2k, XP, 2003 option via right click on the taskbar or CTRL-ALT-DEL) Performance tab to check your memory usage while you work. If your memory usage exceeds the Total Physical Memory, I'd definitely add more RAM. If it is greater than 400 Mb it is probably beneficial. If you rarely exceed 300Mb RAM usage you probably won't gain a lot from adding the extra RAM.
     

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  4. 2005/08/25
    Arie

    Arie Administrator Administrator Staff

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    Depends how large (byte size) your images are, and the program(s) you use to work with them...

    ReggieB gave you some good info on checking your current memory usage.

    For the rest, more ram = better, but as you say, it might not be worth the $80.
     
    Arie,
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  5. 2005/08/25
    mattman

    mattman Inactive Alumni

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    I suggest that you look at the "system requirements" of the programs you are using. Win XP should run standard programs easily with 256MB of RAM. If the digital imaging program requires 512MB "recommended" running several windows in it will slow things down (is it only slow when running the digital imaging program?).

    I have found antiviruses and other programs that want to continuously monitor, slow things down if they have trouble with the file system.

    One of my friends has a 1 year old, $3000 Hewlett Packard that is running slowly. Another friend recommended more RAM, but I am certain that will not fix the problem.

    Another friend asked me about putting more RAM in his son's computer. When I looked at it and removed the "shopping program" it was running like new again.

    A Win 98 system I looked at had more than 2000 files in the Temp folder. It took more than 30 minutes to delete them. It runs fine now.

    Suggest you look at background programs (antivirus, spyware, etc). If it seems very slow at startup it may be bad drivers. Run Checkdisk.

    Matt
     
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