Bigger Ram? or faster RAM?

kwikbreaks

If your chipset supports dual channel RAM then putting in mismatched chips would disable that. I suspect this may be why the performance dropped off rather than the speed of the modules.

IMO fitting over 2GB of RAM will only bring you marginal improvements unless you are really driving the system hard and you won't see much benefit from your £50.

datimms

Hello,
I thought I'd post my findings in case anybody else is suffering with similar problems. What I've actually done is upgrade to Windows 7. Frankly the difference is upsetting, it used to be that once you upgrade operating system, your computer slowed. I'm much happier with the system performance now, and if I want, (sorry- need) to I've still got Vista installed on a partition.

For some people, upgrading won't be an option. I did manage to improve things in Vista before I decided to upgrade. The biggest thing that improved the performance was swtiching off "Let Windows choose what's best for my computer" in the Performance section of System Properties and disabling some of the fancy visual effects. Disabling animations instantly made switching applications feel snappier. I just did a google search to find out what each option did and made a decision if I really wanted that feature, (and a lot of the time I didn't or didn't care!). I would recommend looking into that first before trying anything else.

Hope this helps someone!

iamcornholio

Can Vista 32 bit use 4gb of RAM, or is it limited to 3 like XP?

Slow hard disks are often a bigger influence on speed than the ram speed or going from 2gb to 3

Also update bios if possible

turbobob

datimms wrote: »

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

This doesn't sound right. Not doubting what you are saying BTW, but there's something odd there. 5.9 is the highest possible rating in Windows Vista, and it requires 5.9 in all categories. See this blog from a couple of years ago about building a PC to achieve a 5.9 rating in Vista, and note the parts he's using. A Turion processor and 8400M graphics chip should not get 5.9, as they have never been high end parts. A 4.6 rating is more likely to be "correct".

The other thing is that the difference between DDR2-533 and DDR2-667 would probably be worth about .1 or .2 on that rating system, and would be unlikely to be that noticeable in real usage.

calvin19

Sergio_Duarte wrote: »

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

yeah 2 x 2 is the best choice with 800Mhz

John_Gray

iamcornholio wrote: »

Can Vista 32 bit use 4gb of RAM, or is it limited to 3 like XP?

Read post #10. It's the 32-bit-ness which is important, not the operating system. Even the more expensive versions of Windows Server 32-bit operating systems have to implement a massive bodge to go above 3-4 GB of real memory!