Re: Does Vista Home Premimum Play Nice With 4GB Memory?

On Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:40:01 -0700, Five By Five <5x5@xxxxxxx> wrote:


I am hearing some talk----urban legends?----and reading on the web that
32-bit Vista does not know how to manage 4 GB memory, which is odd, since
2^32 addressable spaces---namely 4GB---are all about that.

You hear lots of talk. Interested in facts? In addition to what others
already set regarding how 32 bit Windows uses 4 GB of RAM you should
be aware having 4 GB RAM is OVERKILL for 99% of users.

I spend most of my day working on video editing at a professional
level using Sony's flagship Vegas. Rendering a video is one of the
most demanding tasks you can ask of any personal computer since it
really tasks the CPU. Being curious I tried various amounts of RAM to
see if it would create any worthwhile MEASURABLE improvement.

Changing from 1 GB to 2 GB there was some improvement, not a huge
amount but noticeable. Going from 2 GB to 4GB using a 32 bit version
of Vista Business the further "imprisonment" was not significant
enough to justify the expense.

I have a 1-year old notebook that came with 2GB memory standard with VHP,
and I am thinking that the hard drive is working WAY TOO HARD as part of
the Virtual Mem. Screen/application updates are SUPER slow, and I really
don't have many tasks running (see OTHER BACKGROUND INFO below).

Am I wasting my money and time upgrading to 4 GB from 2 GB?

Screen updates should be nearly instant. A good test is to view a
dozen or so moderately large graphic files in rapid order using
Vista's own included Image Viewer. Then images should change and flash
by as fast and you can click the Next Arrow. You should NOT see the
images being drawn on screen nor should you see the new hour glass
icon indicating Vista is struggling along. If you do, something is
wrong and it likely isn't the amount of RAM you have. More likely your
graphic card, your motherboard, your CPU's speed, the speed of your
memory, not the amount of RAM, and how fast your FSB( FrontSideBus) is
which determines how fast data moves between your CPU registers and
memory.

I would download Autoruns (free Utility) and see how much junk gets
loaded at startup. Your system may simply be underpowered to do
multitasking and it is limping along trying. Getting rid of some or
all of the clutter will likely show a improvement.

The best test if you need more RAM or not is let Vista tell you. Use
Task Manager to see. Click Ctrl/Alt/Del, Task Manager, go to
Performance Tab, then go about your business opening and running the
applications you use most while observing the two graphs on the left
of the Task Manager window which should float on top of other windows.
For more details click on the Resource Monitor button.

There are many reasons for sluggish performance. While too little RAM
is a possible cause it belongs near the bottom of the list of
suspects, not the top.



===========

OTHER BACKGROUND INFO:

I don't have really a lot of startup programs and am careful to keep them
to a minimum.

I rely on (reputedly memory hog) Firefox for the browser (TBird for the
mail client), and may have as many as 11-15 tabs open at a time; I access
Netflix on FF running an IE browser object inside (same with Hulu), and I
have a radio station stream playing often when I don't have a movie/TV
content running. I am careful to close browser pages running scripted ads
which suck up processor time. Office 2007 products seem well-behaved
(Word, PP) so I really don't worry about closing them when I have a few of
them open.

I have a lot of PDFs open, but they have never been much trouble. Adobe
Acrobat 8.x Pro was behaving badly in a super slow way, and with a system
reboot, it was still behaving badly. I did an application repair and it
seemed to sort itself out.

Actually you are running a lot of stuff. If you have multiple PDF's
open, are streaming a video, multiple tabs in TBird and all the rest
you said on top of multiple startup programs (you didn't say how many
in you opinion isn't too many) that may be too much to handle.
.