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Tom's Hardware > Forum > Motherboards & Memory > Memory > adding more memory

adding more memory

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fp111   10-13-2008 at 05:03:45 PM

Hi,

I have a 3 year old desktop with windows xp.
I used to have 750 meg memory and just put another 1 gig yesterday.
What a difference :)

Now I wonder if adding another 1 gig will make a difference as big.
by checking the system use, it seem I never use more than 1 gig of my 1.7 gig total memory.

I don't do games, or graphics. I only do accounting and browse the net.

Thanks

Francois

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Shadow703793   10-13-2008 at 05:27:41 PM
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^Well if you don't see your RAM being used over 1GB then I guess you won't notice a big difference. You may also want to consider reducing the PageFile size to 1GB or so.

------------------------------ E2180 @3.2Ghz + P35DS3L +8400GS (700/475 OC)
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 Reply to Shadow703793
GhislainG   10-13-2008 at 05:30:30 PM
- 0 +

Adding more memory won't make a difference if peak memory utilization never exceeds the current memory size.

Message quoted 1 times
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geofelt   10-13-2008 at 06:10:44 PM
- 0 +

GhislainG wrote :

Adding more memory won't make a difference if peak memory utilization never exceeds the current memory size.


XP can't use more ram than it has, nor can any OS. XP dumps pages out of RAM just in case you need some more quickly. More ram will be better. You do get diminishing returns, though. At the current cheap prices for ram, get another 1 or 2gb.

Reply to geofelt
GhislainG   10-13-2008 at 06:28:30 PM
- 0 +

Any O/S swaps out to disk when needed (unless you specifically configure it to only use physical memory, but that's a bit risky). If peak memory utilization exceeded physical memory, then swapping occured. For example, if a system has 2 GB of memory and peak is 2.5 GB, then the O/S had to swap. On the other hand, if peak never even came close to the current memory size, then adding more memory doesn't provide any benefits.

I run a couple VMs on a system with 3 GB of memory and the peak is 2.4 GB and the commit charge is 1.6 GB. Adding more memory would only help if my VMs required more memory and cause swapping.

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