Re: upgrading memory

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 18:49:35 GMT, "Unknown" <unknown@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Absolutely correct. This is known as virtual memory. Even if you are NOT
running an application, but it is in memory, and you wish to run some other
program, what is in memory has to be written on the disk (saved) and the new
program loaded.


Although this is paging, it's essentially one-time paging, usually
taking only a fraction of a second, and hardly hurts at all. It's
constant paging, where what's in memory and what's in the page file
have to continually be exchanged, that's a drag on performance.


This is a very good reason to keep Startup as small as
possible. I.E. Don't load it till you need it.


I completely disagree. It hardly matters what you load. What matters
is what you are actively running. If I load a program and never use
it, it gets paged out almost immediately and stays paged out. The only
penalty is the tiny amount of time it took to page it out in the first
place.

If you automatically load a background program at startup, and that
background program stays busy doing things all the time, then yes, it
will affect your performance, because, besides using CPU cycles, it
increases paging. But load a program that does nothing until you
choose to use it, and it doesn't use the CPU and it doesn't page. For
that reason, there is no penalty associated with loading such a
program.

As I've said in these newsgroups many times, you should be concerned,
not with how *many* of these automatically-starting background
programs you run, but *which*. Some of them can hurt performance
severely, but others have no effect on performance.


"Ken Blake, MVP" <kblake@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:v9kub319jldeqnogbdeh00ti8g384jvcbp@xxxxxxxxxx
On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 11:51:32 -0600, Bruce Chambers
<bchambers@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

mooky wrote:


thee maximum it can support is a gig. I do run a lot of apps at a time
on occasion and wasn't sure if I would notice a lot of difference.


Additional RAM might help some, but how just much it'll help mostly
depends upon the specific applications you use, and how they use/release
memory. I'm afraid there's no hard and fast answer.


I
already went to crucial's site as I mentioned before.


I know, but I wasn't sure if you checked for maximum capacity, as well
as the type of RAM needed, so I wanted to clear up this point, before
you spent money on soemthing you couldn't use.

also, what do
you mean by huge "bottle-neck"...


Sorry. It's a term (alluding to a bottle's narrowed opening) used to
identify a constriction in a process that slows everything down, no
manner how fast the rest of the process might be. Let me try an
imperfect analogy:

Think of a multi-lane expressway that suddenly comes to a toll station
with only one booth manned and/or operating. No matter how fast the
traffic was flowing before it got there, and no matter how fast the
traffic might once again flow once past, that single toll booth is
creating a "bottle-neck," bringing the traffic to a near-stop as it
processes one vehicle at a time.

Your P-III CPU may act in a similar fashion as your increased RAM
provides it with more data traffic at any given time; it can only
process the data so faster, regardlees of how much more data is coming
its way.


Mooky, I'm going to disagree with Bruce here. If additional RAM does
anything for you, it will be because it reduces or eliminates paging
to the hard drive. Reading and writing to the hard drive are physical
mechanical events, and always much slower than the electronic
manipulation of data that occurs in the CPU or in RAM. For that
reason, reducing of paging will almost always provide a speed
increase, and usually a substantial one. It's the hard drive that's
the bottleneck here, not the CPU, which, even if old and slow, is
still many times faster than the drive.

--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP Windows - Shell/User
Please Reply to the Newsgroup


--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP Windows - Shell/User
Please Reply to the Newsgroup
.

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