512 MB or 1 GB RAM with Win XP Pro

[Abhishek]

can someone suggest whether 512 MB of RAM is a better option or 1 GB
RAM is a better options and with what pagefile settings, should i
disable page file if i buy 1 GB. system is based on Athlon XP 2400+.
and the apps i use it are games, email, internet, visual studio 6,
visual studio 2003 and photo editiong apps.

would getting 1 GB RAM degrade the performace of the pc.


thanks,
A

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

In

can someone suggest whether 512 MB of RAM is a better option or 1 GB
RAM is a better options and with what pagefile settings, should i
disable page file if i buy 1 GB. system is based on Athlon XP 2400+.
and the apps i use it are games, email, internet, visual studio 6,
visual studio 2003 and photo editiong apps.

would getting 1 GB RAM degrade the performace of the pc.

More memory will certainly not degrade performance. The question
is whether it will improve performance. The answer depends on
what you do with your computer. Since you say you do photo
editing, 1GB may well provide a substantial benefit over 512MB.

Do not disable the page file under *any* circumstances. For page
file settings, read MVP Alex Nichol's article here:
http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

1 GB of RAM will really add to the overall performance of
Windows XP. But remember, Windows XP is a is a Virtual
Memory Operating System and one should not disable the
page file. Set the Virtual Memory Initial Size to 1024 MB
and the Maxixmum Size to 2048 MB if you install 1 GB RAM.

How to set performance options in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=308417

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User

Be Smart! Protect your PC!
http://www.microsoft.com/security/protect/

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"Abhishek" (e-mail address removed) wrote in message:

| can someone suggest whether 512 MB of RAM is a better option or 1 GB
| RAM is a better options and with what pagefile settings, should i
| disable page file if i buy 1 GB. system is based on Athlon XP 2400+.
| and the apps i use it are games, email, internet, visual studio 6,
| visual studio 2003 and photo editiong apps.
|
| would getting 1 GB RAM degrade the performace of the pc.
|
|
| thanks,
| A

 

[Al Dykes]

can someone suggest whether 512 MB of RAM is a better option or 1 GB
RAM is a better options and with what pagefile settings, should i
disable page file if i buy 1 GB. system is based on Athlon XP 2400+.
and the apps i use it are games, email, internet, visual studio 6,
visual studio 2003 and photo editiong apps.

would getting 1 GB RAM degrade the performace of the pc.


thanks,
A

If the 75 bucks or so that a 512MB meory stick costs then you should
build the machine with 512MB memory, try it, measure the memory usage
with perfom and then decide what your bottleneck is.

If you try to run a game, photoshop a 100MB Photoshop PSD file, and
develop some code in VS6 all at the same time, I think you need a dual
processor and 2GB RAM

Someone still has to prove to me that "no swap file" for a general
purpose windows machine isn't snake oil.

If you are a heavy Photoshop user you need two disks _and_ lots of
memory. perfom may help you decide if you should spend $75 on
memory, or a second 10Krpm disk for swap, temp, and PSD files.

If you use something like Photoshop elements I can say it works fine
on a 512MB machine and a second disk makes a big differnece.

 

[Peter Hucker]

If the 75 bucks or so that a 512MB meory stick costs then you should
build the machine with 512MB memory, try it, measure the memory usage
with perfom and then decide what your bottleneck is.

If you try to run a game, photoshop a 100MB Photoshop PSD file, and
develop some code in VS6 all at the same time, I think you need a dual
processor and 2GB RAM

Someone still has to prove to me that "no swap file" for a general
purpose windows machine isn't snake oil.

If you are a heavy Photoshop user you need two disks _and_ lots of
memory. perfom may help you decide if you should spend $75 on
memory, or a second 10Krpm disk for swap, temp, and PSD files.

If you use something like Photoshop elements I can say it works fine
on a 512MB machine and a second disk makes a big differnece.

Running a (oh it's listed below!) 4x250GB drives in a mirror/stripe, 3GB of ram. Should be 4, but the triple graphics cards eat all the address space.

Anything less is sluggish

--
FOURTEEN - CHECK OUT THE BABY! parrots and rising http://www.petersparrots.com
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Served from a pentawatercooled dual 2.8GHz silent Athlon with half TB RAID.

Women generally don't fart as much as men, because they never shut up long enough to build up pressure.

 

[R. McCarty]

If you have an Intel based system (Recent), and your motherboard
supports Dual-Channel RAM, then I'd go ahead an use 2 512 Meg
sticks of matching memory.
As to Pagefile. I have 1.0 Gig of Physical Ram in my machine. I use
a 128 Meg (minimum size) Pagefile. At most I see usage around 40
to 50 Megabytes of that. Even with Audio mastering and other apps
open, it doesn't see that much traffic. Irregardless of how much
physical RAM you have, XP wants that Pagefile space for "Parking"
some code there. With a fresh boot and no Apps open, just the 27
services, I'll see 25-40 Megabytes of content in the Pagefile.
So I would have to say that you shouldn't disable Virtual Memory in
an XP install.
On overall system performance, I would avoid a RAID setup & if
your budget allows it maybe consider a SCSI drive setup. I do a
fair amount of Audio remastering and access times of around 5-7 mS
makes a big difference. That's especially true if you work with very
large file sizes. There are also other customizations that you can
employ to speed up Audio & Video work.

 

[Al Dykes]

If you have an Intel based system (Recent), and your motherboard
supports Dual-Channel RAM, then I'd go ahead an use 2 512 Meg
sticks of matching memory.
As to Pagefile. I have 1.0 Gig of Physical Ram in my machine. I use
a 128 Meg (minimum size) Pagefile. At most I see usage around 40
to 50 Megabytes of that. Even with Audio mastering and other apps
open, it doesn't see that much traffic. Irregardless of how much
physical RAM you have, XP wants that Pagefile space for "Parking"
some code there. With a fresh boot and no Apps open, just the 27
services, I'll see 25-40 Megabytes of content in the Pagefile.
So I would have to say that you shouldn't disable Virtual Memory in
an XP install.

FYI The size of the page file doesn't slow down the system, How often
you hit it does (measured in pages/sec, with perfmon.) If you have
enough memory you will see nearly zero paging when you are doing the
mainstream function in an application and the paging will spike when
you switch another part of the application (i.e. the help system) or
hot-switch to another application you've already started. In general,
when pages are being _read_ from the pagefile you are watching the
hourglass. Page writes can be done in background unless you've got
_way_ too little memory.

 

[J. S. Pack]

If the 75 bucks or so that a 512MB meory stick costs then you should
build the machine with 512MB memory, try it, measure the memory usage
with perfom and then decide what your bottleneck is.

If you try to run a game, photoshop a 100MB Photoshop PSD file, and
develop some code in VS6 all at the same time, I think you need a dual
processor and 2GB RAM

Someone still has to prove to me that "no swap file" for a general
purpose windows machine isn't snake oil.

No, nobody has to. Why don't you just prove it to yourself?

 

[Mark]

FYI The size of the page file doesn't slow down the system,

Well, given XP's braindead memory management, it's more the
_existence_ of a page file that slows the system down. When I was
running a 1GB system with no page file, it was significantly faster
than running it with a page file: unfortunately a few programs just
won't run reliably without one. There are few things more annoying
about XP than having it swap out your web browser when you copy a 2GB
file from one disk to another... yeah, great, maybe the file copy goes
0.1 second faster because it's eaten up the entire gigabyte of RAM for
a huge disk cache, but I then have to sit there for ten seconds while
the browser swaps back in. Absolutely horrid behaviour for an OS.

I should not be having applications swapped out on a 1GB system where
the applications aren't using any significant fraction of that
gigabyte: but there just doesn't seem to be any way to get XP to stop
it from doing it. At least on Win98 you could put a setting in a .ini
file to limit the disk cache size, but XP doesn't seem to have any
similar option... some bozo at Microsoft decided that disk cache was
more important than applications, and we're stuck with the results.

Mark

 

[Alex Nichol]

can someone suggest whether 512 MB of RAM is a better option or 1 GB
RAM is a better options and with what pagefile settings, should i
disable page file if i buy 1 GB. system is based on Athlon XP 2400+.
and the apps i use it are games, email, internet, visual studio 6,
visual studio 2003 and photo editiong apps.

would getting 1 GB RAM degrade the performace of the pc.

It would not degrade, but might do no more for you than 512 would do.
It all depends on your work pattern, and especially on whether you load
up multiple instances of several programs at once. If the 1G is a
reasonably cheap subsequent upgrade, I would start with 512, read up at
my page www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm on the size of page file, and use
the tool linked from it to assess how much *actual* use of it you make
during typical sessions. If the answer is not much (there will always
be 20 or so MB on a contingency basis) then you will not get benefit
from the larger size

 

[Alex Nichol]

Someone still has to prove to me that "no swap file" for a general
purpose windows machine isn't snake oil.

Read my page at www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm, which tells you how a
large part of your RAM would then be locked out doing nothing whatever.

 

[tommy626]

thank you for your link, it was very helpful

 

[Alex Nichol]

Well, given XP's braindead memory management, it's more the
_existence_ of a page file that slows the system down. When I was
running a 1GB system with no page file, it was significantly faster
than running it with a page file: unfortunately a few programs just
won't run reliably without one.

And in doing so you are throwing away a lot of your RAM to be used to
assign to pages that have never been brought into use, and probably
never will. But the system has to assign them somewhere. A fair guess
would be that you have around 400 MB of such pages once you have loaded
a genuine 600MB, and this would make the machine behave as a 600MB one
with a page file that got no actual traffic.