Bigger Ram? or faster RAM?

datimms

Hi,

This is one for the techies. I'm considering upgrading the RAM on my laptop. I keep it pretty clean, defrag often, use ccleaner often etc etc. I just want to squeeze a bit more "instantness" out of it; I see upgrading the RAM as a low cost option to improve things somewhat. I have also (sadly) always wondered what the answer is.

It currently has 2GB (2 x 1GB of DDR2-5300 (667Mhz)) and I am running Windows Vista 32-bit. I have an AMD x64 Turion TL-60 processor with 2GHz. This configuration gives me a user experience rating of 5.9 in Vista.

I have a "spare" module from my old laptop, which I upgraded shortly before it died. If I used this it would save me some £££. This is a 2GB 4200 (533MHz). If I use this, all the memory in my newer laptop will run at the slower speed, but it will have 3GB total. This configuration gives me a user experience rating of 4.6

So in the benchmark vista uses, bigger, slower RAM is worse than what I already have. In usage, I can't really feel a difference, more RAM might be faster but I haven't tested it too much really. And it also might be my expectations coming in to play.

I have another option - buy a new module with the correct speed.

So the question is, what's better? Would it be worth it to buy the faster RAM. (If I ended up buying new RAM, I would probably go the whole hog and 2x 2GB so this would cost approx £45-£50)

Thanks!

HTML200

Hi.

What do you mostly use the machine for? Is it general word processing and stuff, or photo editing / movie editing, or gaming? Have you checked to see how much of your memory is being used when everything's running?

datimms

I pretty much use it for everything but gaming.
I watch a lot of video in free time and listen to music while i'm working.
I often use several windows at the same time, sometimes it takes a while to switch between. One application in particular uses a lot of processes whether it is in focus or not as it constantly monitors a website for changes in betting odds, so I think this could benefit from more memory. Rarely use MP3 and video encoding.
I often use my laptop on dual screen, and the graphics is part-shared (it seems to use a fixed 50% of the installed memory and I can't find the setting to alter this).

I've not checked memory usage on a regular basis, but I've noticed my page file is often >1GB. I just go by how it feels, and it feels quite sluggish sometimes.

datimms

I've just checked memory, I have two Firefox windows open, two Word documents and Excel open and the current figures are: Total physical memory 3070MB, cached 2033, Free 57. The bar chart shows 41% memory usage. Page file 1316M/ 6368M

HTML200

My general feeling is that 2GB ought to be more than enough for what you're doing, but others may be able to suggest some tuning tips for Vista as I'm not familiar with it.

Sergio_Duarte

yeah 2x 2 gb ram is the best choice to move on. for vista it needs a minimum of 1 gb ram.

HTML200

Given that Vista is quite graphics-intensive (if you have the Aero engine switched on), and that one of your points mentions it takes a while to switch between windows (likely to be a graphics-intensive operation), and that you're running it on a laptop (which tend to have less powerful graphics cards), I wonder if this could be the root of the problem?

Maybe it would help to post the laptop model.

datimms

It's an HP 6820ea, it's about a year old and the graphics card is an NVIDIA 8400M GS. With the slow 3GB ram installed, the system properties for my graphics card shows that the graphics is currently hogging 1279MB system memory (plus 256mb of its own - approx 1.5GB total). It was only using approx 1GB total before with the original 2GB total memory installed, so it seems to configure itself to use 50% of the available memory. I don't know how "stubborn" the shared memory is (ie, can the system grab some back if the graphics card doesn't need it during something intensive).
I looked in BIOS for a setting and searched google but can't find a way to tune/limit how much memory the graphics card uses. It seems crazy to hard-wire the split at 50%!

HTML200

If I get time, I'll look into this further, but in the meantime I suggest the following.

First of all, go to the Nvidia website and download the latest drivers for your graphics card, and then reboot. If you don't feel comfortable doing that, then try skipping to next step and see if it does any good:

Secondly, look through all the graphics options you can find and see if you can find a way to limit the graphics card memory useage to between 256 and 512MB (lower the better).

It sounds like your graphics card is stealing too much of your system memory.

John_Gray

Even if you install 4 GB of memory for a 32-bit operating system, only 3 GB (roughly) will actually be used. The figure you quote for your Vista box of 3070 MB seems about right. I'm not aware of any way of limiting the amount of RAM used by the graphics card, and even as if it is as much as 512 MB that probably won't make much difference in performance for what you're running.

If you are thinking of changing to the 64-bit versions of Vista or Windows 7, you can throw as much memory at the PC as the motherboard will support!

pstones578

datimms wrote: »

Hi,

This is one for the techies. I'm considering upgrading the RAM on my laptop. I keep it pretty clean, defrag often, use ccleaner often etc etc. I just want to squeeze a bit more "instantness" out of it; I see upgrading the RAM as a low cost option to improve things somewhat. I have also (sadly) always wondered what the answer is.

It currently has 2GB (2 x 1GB of DDR2-5300 (667Mhz)) and I am running Windows Vista 32-bit. I have an AMD x64 Turion TL-60 processor with 2GHz. This configuration gives me a user experience rating of 5.9 in Vista.

I have a "spare" module from my old laptop, which I upgraded shortly before it died. If I used this it would save me some £££. This is a 2GB 4200 (533MHz). If I use this, all the memory in my newer laptop will run at the slower speed, but it will have 3GB total. This configuration gives me a user experience rating of 4.6

So in the benchmark vista uses, bigger, slower RAM is worse than what I already have. In usage, I can't really feel a difference, more RAM might be faster but I haven't tested it too much really. And it also might be my expectations coming in to play.

I have another option - buy a new module with the correct speed.

So the question is, what's better? Would it be worth it to buy the faster RAM. (If I ended up buying new RAM, I would probably go the whole hog and 2x 2GB so this would cost approx £45-£50)

Thanks!

You'll be fine with whatever you put in. The difference between the speeds shouldn't really be noticeable at all. Sometimes though it's best just to get the faster stuff just so you don't keep thinking about it after the fact.