Vista Memory

[Guest]

Hi, I have a new ThinkPad T61. It came with 1 gig of RAM and the machine's
performance was very poor. I added a second gig and the performance improved
quite a bit but it is still not as good as my older and much slower
(processor) machine running on XP with the same memory. I've read that the
intel processor can't use more than 3 gigs. I've been told that with the
intel core duo you should use memory in pairs. I only have 2 memory slots.
My question is what's the best combination of memory to get maximum
performance while limiting my cost?

 

[Tiberius]

you can get one 2 gig stick and one 1 gig..

although I would go for 2x2 gigs.. you may get a total of something like
3.3 gigs out of all of that.. AND if your cpu is 64 bit you will be able to
use
a 64 bit OS in the future and it will utilize it all

People here do not believe me when I say vista is slow even on new
hardware..

they prefer to mock me and call me names....

You can do various things to improve vista a lot...

if you want me to tell you some tips and tricks about disabling stuff so
you can get some juice out of your system
ask here and I will write an extensive post..

You must understand that you have enough ram as it is now.. vista is just
hogging up other resources.

 

[Paul Smith]

Hi, I have a new ThinkPad T61. It came with 1 gig of RAM and the
machine's
performance was very poor. I added a second gig and the performance
improved
quite a bit but it is still not as good as my older and much slower
(processor) machine running on XP with the same memory. I've read that
the
intel processor can't use more than 3 gigs. I've been told that with the
intel core duo you should use memory in pairs. I only have 2 memory
slots.
My question is what's the best combination of memory to get maximum
performance while limiting my cost?

Unless you're doing any memory intensive tasks, 2GB is fine at the moment,
increasing RAM beyond that won't yield much in the way of performance.

Is the poor performance related to disk activity? If it is you might want
to try disabling SuperFetch (Start Search - Services). I did this on one of
my mobile machines which has a slow disk and it improved post-boot
performance quite a bit. Really depends on when and where you're seeing the
poor performance.

--
Paul Smith,
Yeovil, UK.
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User.
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/
http://www.windowsresource.net/

*Remove nospam. to reply by e-mail*

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Hi, I have a new ThinkPad T61. It came with 1 gig of RAM and the machine's
performance was very poor. I added a second gig and the performance improved
quite a bit but it is still not as good as my older and much slower
(processor) machine running on XP with the same memory. I've read that the
intel processor can't use more than 3 gigs. I've been told that with the
intel core duo you should use memory in pairs. I only have 2 memory slots.
My question is what's the best combination of memory to get maximum
performance while limiting my cost?

If you presently have 2GB of RAM, it's highly unlikely that adding any
more will improve performance. You get good performance if the amount
of RAM you have keeps you from using the page file, and that depends
on what apps you run. Most people running Vista with a typical range
of business applications can not make effective use of more than 2GB.
Only if you perform particularly memory-demanding tasks such as
editing videos or large photographic images is any more RAM likely to
help you.

Performance issues are very often malware-related these days. What
antispyware and anti-virus applications do you run, and do you keep
them up to date?

 

[John Barnes]

You say your processor is much faster. Is each core faster than the speed
of the prior cpu. Your tasks will only run on one core and if it is slower,
any improvements in architecture may not be enough to make a single task as
fast. Vista is not very good at allocating tasks. You should look in task
manager and see if you have one core doing the bulk of the work. You may
find it to your advantage to allocate tasks manually.

 

[Sumer Yamaner]

In a portable computer with the new Santa Rosa processor (T7300) and 2 GB of
RAM you shouldn't experience poor performance. I don't think adding
additional RAM would speed it up. Using memory in pairs increases
performance in desktop computers with mainboards with dual channel memory
architecture. I don't know whether your laptop has such an architecture. If
yes, adding exactly the same amount of RAM (doubling the RAM size) can have
some positive impact on overall performance. Whether this increase is
clearly noticeable is questionable.
In portable systems the bottleneck is usually the hard disk. Maybe you need
some adjustments in the BIOS or maybe you have to intall additional software
to increase the disk performance.
You can also try to switch off some unneeded services (be careful!).