Questions Regarding RAM

[zmackdavis]

Hey Everyone,

I have a couple questions here... Just busy pulling my hair our trying to convince our company to increase the amount of DDR RAM in our computers (Pentium 4, 2.8 GHZ). I went to the task manager and jotted down the amount of RAM currently being used by each program and came to the conclusion that roughly 375MB of my 512MB RAM was being used. My question is this: If I never use the total 512 MB of RAM installed on this system, would increasing to 1GB total make any difference at all? I notice that Firefox was soaking up 200-300MB alone, and when I shut that down, my computer runs a lot faster. If I'm not reaching 512 MB in usage, why does it make a difference?

The second question: A few of our desktop computers were not designed to display on the 16:9 widescreen monitors. We have someone here who has installed a driver that is able to convert it, but it makes her computer run much much slower. Would increasing RAM help this in any way whatsoever? I'm guessing it has more to do with the on board VGA or w/e, and that additional RAM will not help this.

Thanks in advance!

 

[jemm]

RAM is very unexpensive at the moment, you should have no problem in convincing your purchase depto. to get more RAM for everyone.

Programs like Firefox will run smoothly and faster with a bit more Ram.

For the resolutions, you´ve got it right; this depto is a vga related issue, though more ram can mitigate the situation.