| Forum Home | ||||
| Press F1 | ||||
| Thread ID: 27211 | 2002-11-17 01:49:00 | RAM Q's | Trev0 (1995) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 99143 | 2002-11-17 01:49:00 | I have a 1300mhz celeron and 384Mbs of SD ram running XP home and was wondering if anyone knows, if upping it to 512Mbs (motherboard max), would make much difference to the general speed of opening apps, browsing files, searching, etc? RAM seems to be cheap at the mo, so if I thought I'd get turbo performance from my '1.3L', and turn it into a '3.8GTX' I'd go for it... but I don't think I use all the RAM I have now, so I'm unsure. Also, if it is worth it, and I can put the stripes on the side, could I get away with buying the cheap 1 sided sdram (256 $56) or is the 2 sided sdram (256 $79) worth the extra $23?? |
Trev0 (1995) | ||
| 99144 | 2002-11-17 03:22:00 | The type of RAM is limited by the design of your motherboard, check the manual. I have noticed that XP home goes "OK" with 128 M of RAM, better with 192 M, not really noticeably better with 256. Presently running 512 M of Ram, but performance not noticeably better than 256. I an sure it is better, as yours will be if you upgrade, but you may bot *notice* it. If you were doing large graphics manipulation etc, you may get a benefit. |
godfather (25) | ||
| 99145 | 2002-11-17 20:58:00 | Thanks for saving me $79 Godfather, I won't bother. I think I have both 1 and 2 sided ram in this comp the 128 all the chips are on 1 side and the 256 has them on both, so I thought 1sided 256 meant bigger chips on 1 side? or am I barking up the wrong tree totally?? Thanks again |
Trev0 (1995) | ||
| 99146 | 2002-11-18 05:55:00 | Well i'm on the other side of the fence to God Father. Indeed you 384Meg is not bad. But i believe you will get a reasonable performance bost from going up to 512. I run WinME on 258Mb, and i find that i often use it all up, and then move onto virtual memmory, which is as slow as a turtle. In reality 256MB i would consider to be a minimum for WinXp. so your only 128Mb above that. Ofcourse it fully depends on what your computer is used for. If its just surifing the net, and listening to Mp3's then you won't find a performance gain. Use your system monitor and enable the "unused physical memmory" option. at the same time enable "swapfile in use" both from the memmory manager section. The fact that unused physical memmory remains low is probably good, as it shows windows is using it to the full extent, but if that swapfile in use starts up then it shows that you would benefit from more ram, Equivalent to how much is been used in the swapfile. |
roofus (483) | ||
| 99147 | 2002-11-18 08:32:00 | To check how much I use sounds like good advise, but where do I find the 'memory manager' to - enable the "unused physical memory" along with the "swapfile in use" option? does XP home have that? or perhaps it's called something else?? | Trev0 (1995) | ||
| 99148 | 2002-11-18 10:29:00 | Trev0, not familiar with XP but in ME the memory manager is found in Programs/Accesories/System Tools/System Monitor. Open the System Monitor and Edit/Add Item/Memory Manager/and the options are there before you. | Danger (287) | ||
| 99149 | 2002-11-18 20:15:00 | Thanks Danger, I don't seem to have a 'memory manager'! at least it's not where it is on ME. But I do have a 'Microsoft Management Console' that looks complicated to learn...and may not do the test anyway! any other thoughts? |
Trev0 (1995) | ||
| 99150 | 2002-11-18 23:32:00 | Ok trev0 "memmory manager" is a section in the programme "system monitor" as another person suggested its under accessories. If it isn't there then install it from the add/remove programmes in control panel. Once that is done my instructions will make sense. p.s. i state this for win9x machines. I don't know if they have taken it away from XP, but i doubt it. |
roofus (483) | ||
| 99151 | 2002-11-18 23:35:00 | You should be able to hit Ctrl+Alt+Esc to bring up the Proccess Manager. One of the tab's up the top will be something to do with resources. In there, It'll say how much RAM you've used. If itss getting near full frequently, then upping the RAM might be a good idea! | Chilling_Silence (9) | ||
| 99152 | 2002-11-19 20:52:00 | OK- Ctrl+Alt+DLTE brings up the task manager. In 'Performance' in there has 2 different memory's Kernal memory, (total 50456, paged 36120 and non paged 14336) and Physical memory (total 391152 available 174928, changing at the refresh speed and system cache 238472) I guess this one is the RAM? It also records cpu usage (all over the place!) and page file usage (137K) unfortunatly I don't see an option to log any of this though to get an over all impression of how much I usually use. It does show a small hisorical graph of cpu usage and page file usage, but probably only about 10 mins (and I don't think it's much to do with the ram) No sign of the 'system monitor' Roofus any Ideas on logging? thanks guys... |
Trev0 (1995) | ||
| 1 2 3 | |||||