Need more RAM ?

[GoldHawk]

I have 2 family laptops, as follows:

Dell Inspiron 1721
CPU: AMD Turion 64 x 2 Mobile Technology TL-56
Memory: 2 GB DDR2 RAM

HP G70-120EM
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 @ 2GHz
Memory: 3072MB DDR2 SDRAM

Each machine is only used for Office applications, surfing, MSN and some
light gaming. The most resource hungry application is probably Sims2.

The HP is new and is impressively fast for what is required. The Dell is a
year old but even out of the box has been sluggish, taking a long time to
boot up and load applications. My guess is that the difference is in the
processors and the Dell AMD is not really up to the job. However, my
question is whether by upgrading the Dell to 4GB of RAM (for which it has
capacity) would significantly improve performance.

Is anyone able to give me any advice, please ?

Mike

 

[Dominic Payer]

If, as is almost certain, the laptops are running 32-bit Vista there is
no point increasing the RAM over 3GB as anything over this would not be
used by the system. 32-bit Vista can address a maximum of 4GB, but this
includes the video memory and various system BIOSes so, in practice, the
maximum usable memory is 3-3.5GB.

For the use you specify, 2GB is a good allocation. The Inspiron 1721 is
a budget machine. To speed it up, uninstall any applications you do not
use and make sure you have the latest chipset and graphics drivers.

 

[Curious]

I only have 1 GB of Ram on my almost 3 year old laptop with Vista 32 bit and
have no performance problems with any standard desktop applications such as
office apps or Internet Explorer.
I don't know how much memory Sim2 requires for decent performance but I
would certainly think a 2GB system would be sufficient assuming that there
is enough virtual memory configured.

 

[Mike Hall - MVP]

You do know that virtual memory is very slow right?

MacOS, Linux and Unix all use pagefiles too..

 

[Tom Ferguson]

Just a quick note on installed applications:

Uninstalling applications is not going to affect system performance unless-

The applications are running or pre-load some significant part of their
operating set even if not running

or

there is an issue with free drive space. Windows requires some free disk
space for its use for temporary files, virtual memory, swap file and the
like.

That aside, you can install as many applications you like.
--

Tom
MSMVP 1998-2007

 

[Curious]

Yes but if there is not enough to assist in removing inactive processes from
main memory then the performance of active processes will suffer.

 

[GoldHawk]

With thanks to all who have responded.

I'm disappointed to hear that the Dell is a "budget machine" as it cost half
as much again as the recent HP, only 12 months ago. I appreciate that costs
are coming down and technology moves on fast, but even so..... Perhaps I
should have researched the CPU / spec a bit more before I bought.

The point about the Dell is that it has been very slow to boot up / load
programs from day 1, straight out of the box, even before Sims2 or anything
else was installed. It was, and still is, much slower than my old desktop
machine running XP, and not what I expected. It's been very disappointing.

I take the point about installed programs, particularly if they are loading
on start up, but, as above. There's really not that much installed, anyway.

I will check out the chipset & graphics drivers.

I had a general idea about virtual memory and have now read up some more. I
assume I get to this through Control Panel. I will try this.

I appreciate the link to the Vista tutorial, which looks good. I will try
some of that as well.

I'll post back.

With thanks again.

Mike Evesham UK

 

[GoldHawk]

I've looked at the virtual memory. I have a 146GB HHD partitioned 136GB /
10GB.

On the 136GB C:\ drive the "Automatically manage paging file size for all
drives" was checked. 2875MB was recommended. I have checked "Custom Size"
and set initial size at 2000MB and maximum size at 4000MB, but that is all
rather a guess. The 10GB D:\ drive had the "No paging file" checked. I have
set the custom setting to 2875MB for both initial and maximum size. Again,
all a bit of a guess.

I can't say any of this really makes much of a difference, but perhaps I've
got the settings wrong. Any advice please on what settings I should be
entering for optimum performance ?

Incidentally, following this I've made some setting changes on an old
desktop running WinXP with SP3, and unless I am imagining things, there
seems to be a slight improvement in performance (speed).

Mike Evesham UK