Advantage of increasing memory?

  • Thread starter Thread starter freecycle
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freecycle

My works laptop is a Dell Latitude D630 running XP
Professional version 2002 with SP2. It comes with
1Gb of memory and has a spare slot. Crucial.co.uk
say I can go an extra 1Gb for £16
or throw away my 1Gb and go 2 x 2Gb for £64.

What increase in response times are we talking about
for these, or are these increases just for heavy cpu
processes that I won't be running?
TIA,
FC
 
freecycle schreef:
My works laptop is a Dell Latitude D630 running XP
Professional version 2002 with SP2. It comes with
1Gb of memory and has a spare slot. Crucial.co.uk
say I can go an extra 1Gb for £16
or throw away my 1Gb and go 2 x 2Gb for £64.

What increase in response times are we talking about
for these, or are these increases just for heavy cpu
processes that I won't be running?
TIA,
FC
Click to expand...

Hi freecycle,

Firstly: 16 pounds for a 1 gig extra memory isn't very much. Sounds like
a good deal to me.

Do you need it?
A simple, barely scientific test, is this:
1) Start the programs you use. Just open a bunch of them you typically
need when working on your computer.
2) Hit ctrl-Alt-Del and start Windows Task Manager.
3) Click on the performance tab

Now look at Physical memory (numbers expressed in Kilobytes).
It says:
Total: xxxx
Available: xxxx
System Cache: xxxx

If Available is resonably high, you have enough memory for your current
tasks.
If it is low, you better buy more memory.
(I consider low <100.000K, but that is very debatable)

In general, if your computer starts swapping: it is using the harddisk
for extra memory, which degrades performance a lot, then you need more
memory.

Just my 2 cent.

Regards,
Erwin Moller
 
Erwin said:
freecycle schreef:

Hi freecycle,

Firstly: 16 pounds for a 1 gig extra memory isn't very much. Sounds like
a good deal to me.

Do you need it?
A simple, barely scientific test, is this:
1) Start the programs you use. Just open a bunch of them you typically
need when working on your computer.
2) Hit ctrl-Alt-Del and start Windows Task Manager.
3) Click on the performance tab

Now look at Physical memory (numbers expressed in Kilobytes).
It says:
Total: xxxx
Available: xxxx
System Cache: xxxx

If Available is resonably high, you have enough memory for your current
tasks.
If it is low, you better buy more memory.
(I consider low <100.000K, but that is very debatable)

In general, if your computer starts swapping: it is using the harddisk
for extra memory, which degrades performance a lot, then you need more
memory.

Just my 2 cent.

Regards,
Erwin Moller
Click to expand...

Very good advice from Erwin and I would just like to say that adding
more than 2Gb would be a waste, as 32 bit windows (which is probably
what you are running) can't address all of it, so it would be wasted.
1Gb is usually ample for every day use and I doubt if you would notice
much if any difference buy adding another 1Gb unless you are doing a lot
of video work.

Regards,
John.
 
What programmes do you run on your Dell? 1 gb RAM memory is more than
enough for most computers.

Available RAM at any given time is less important than the extent to
which the system resorts to using the pagefile at any given time. You
can get some idea of pagefile usage by comparing the Peak entry under
Commit Charge to the total installed RAM. If the Peak is more than the
installed RAM, and this is a regular occurence, then you need to add
RAM. If the Peak is less than the installed RAM then the pagefile usage
is minimal. Some usage of the pagefile is inevitable because some
operations require pagefile memory.

You can get more accurate information on pagefile usage using
pagefilemon, a small freeware utility.

Use page file monitor to observe what is the peak usage. Start it to run
immediately after start-up and look at the log. Pagefilemon takes
snapshots. You need to run it at the beginning of the session at then
run it again at intervals throughout the sessions. The log is Pagefile
log.txt. If you right click on the file in Windows Explorer and select
Send to, Desktop (Create Shortcut). The same applies to
XP_PageFileMon.exe.

A small utility to monitor pagefile usage:
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm

Note that programs using undo features, particularly those associated
with graphics and photo editing, require large amounts of memory so if
you use this type of programme check these first observing how the page
usage increases when they start and whether the usage decreases when you
close the programme.

Think twice before installing 4 mb RAM? There are many threads
discussing this in these newsgroups.
http://snipurl.com/2b8x4 [groups_google_com]

--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
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