RAM memory Question

[John Symth]

My system will take up to 3 GIG of ddr PC2700 sdram. I have 256MB installed
at present and will be installing 512MB soon. How much is too much ram?
Thanks in advance!
Dino

 

[R. McCarty]

Physical motherboard limits or practical amounts ?
Most newer motherboards can support 4 Gigabytes or more.

There is no "Standard" memory size. Over time PCs & OS'es
have greater needs and I'd say the baseline is now no less than
512 and for current and future uses a 1.0 Gigabyte amount of
memory (or more ) is the recommendation.

How much RAM for your personal machine depends on your
usage. If all you do is simple tasks ( Browser, email and Word)
then 512 is likely enough. If you do much work with multimedia
then the 1.0 Gigabyte size is probably not a bad investment.
As Ken Blake says, Windows will find a use for all available
memory - so the answer to your question is "All the machine can
have loaded and use".

Just remember the "Slowest" part of any PC is the disk drive.
You wouldn't want a PC to have 2.0 Gigs or RAM and at the
same time use an older 5400RPM UDMA drive.

 

[Gordon]

My system will take up to 3 GIG of ddr PC2700 sdram. I have 256MB
installed
at present and will be installing 512MB soon. How much is too much ram?
Thanks in advance!
Dino

You only need sufficient RAM such that in your normal usage, the use of the
pagefile is kept to a minimum. Any more than that is a waste of money.

Have a read here:
http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[Tim Slattery]

My system will take up to 3 GIG of ddr PC2700 sdram. I have 256MB installed
at present and will be installing 512MB soon. How much is too much ram?
Thanks in advance!

Depends on how you use your machine. If you run many programs at the
same time, your memory requirements go up. If you're doing image or
video editing, you'll benefit from lots more RAM.

If you have more than your absolute requirement, it won't hurt your
machine or its performance.

 

[HeyBub]

My system will take up to 3 GIG of ddr PC2700 sdram. I have 256MB
installed at present and will be installing 512MB soon. How much is
too much ram? Thanks in advance!

RAM is the gold of computers. It can be traded for speed, versatility, and
many other things.

You can't have too much. You can, however, have too little.

 

[Bob I]

RAM is the gold of computers. It can be traded for speed, versatility, and
many other things.

You can't have too much. You can, however, have too little.

In his case >3 gigs is too much ;-)

 

[caver1]

You only need sufficient RAM such that in your normal usage, the use of the
pagefile is kept to a minimum. Any more than that is a waste of money.

Have a read here:
http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

Look to your Ram usage. If you are constantly using most of your ram get
more. I have 1 gig on mine and free ram never goes below 450 with paging
file at 100 with an average of 56. Buying more ram for me would be a
waste of money.

 

[Rock]

Look to your Ram usage. If you are constantly using most of your ram get
more. I have 1 gig on mine and free ram never goes below 450 with paging
file at 100 with an average of 56. Buying more ram for me would be a waste
of money.

Trying to optimize free RAM is a waste. You want all RAM used. As Gordon
said the key is page file usage.

 

[Rock]

My system will take up to 3 GIG of ddr PC2700 sdram. I have 256MB
installed at present and will be installing 512MB soon. How much is too
much ram? Thanks in advance!

If you can afford it then put in the max of 3GB, but how you use the system
and the programs installed will determine how much of this RAM is actually
used. It could be that much of this is wasted, i.e. you wouldn't see much
benefit with 3GB over 1GB or the 768 MB you're planning on, so in that sense
it's just an issue of economics.

The key element, as Gordon posted, is how much page file is used. Enough
memory causes page file usage to go down but at some point you don't see any
more benefit.

See the link he posted. There is a utility on that page to monitor page
file usage.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

My system will take up to 3 GIG of ddr PC2700 sdram. I have 256MB
installed at present and will be installing 512MB soon. How much is
too much ram? Thanks in advance!

There is no such thing as too much RAM.

You can have more than you can make effective use of, so that some of what
you have is a waste of money, but other than that it can't hurt you to have
it.

How much is more than you can make effective use of? There's no simple,
one-size-fits-all answer to that question. 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 a typical range of business
applications find that somewhere around 256-384MB works well, others need
512MB. Almost anyone will see poor performance with less than 256MB. Some
people, particularly those doing things like editing large photographic
images, can see a performance boost by adding even more than
512MB--sometimes much more.

If you are currently using the page file significantly, more memory will
decrease or eliminate that usage, and improve your performance. If you are
not using the page file significantly, more memory will do nothing for you.
Go to http://billsway.com/notes_public/winxp_tweaks/ and download
WinXP-2K_Pagefile.zip and monitor your pagefile usage. That should give you
a good idea of whether more memory can help, and if so, how much more.

I don't know what apps you run, so anything I say is no more than a guess,
but based on typical usage, my guess is that the 768MB you are planning on
having is more than you can make effective use of.

 

[Jonny]

As others have stated, monitoring swapfile usage is a good reference. Also
to consider is future usage of your PC. 3rd party software like video
decoding/encoding, or going to another OS like Vista for instance. If its a
box you intend to dump in a year for another, don't sweat it.