Is Ram that important?

[Banger]

I am not a games player i confess i have a little dabble on the kids playstation without jamming up my P.C.

The only game i liked playing was 'Age of Empires' but it got so time consuming it got rediculous.

Anyway, If games are not that important is the size of the Ram?

I at this present time have 128ram which runs this 1.7 P.C like treacle! I have gone through everything on start up etc etc but the Computer check came up with to low on vertual memory.

I can't fit more on it i have tried and i will never buy a budget P.C again as this can't be upgraded, Something i was told to look out for on budget P'C's

So a new one has been delayed but in a few weeks will be given the green light.

I see that the minimum now is 256 but i dont want to get trapped again and am thinking of 512 or even 1024!

Once bitten.... as they say.

Is 1024 sensible for the future on a 3gb P.C? or is it a bit OTT!

 

[DrAlf]

More is better up to a point. 1Gb of RAM is quite common on PC’s these days. Depends what you’re going to be doing on the PC though. Each window or application that you have open requires a certain amount of memory. The more RAM you’ve got the more stuff you can have open. 256 is really the minimum, 512 will do you but if 1Gb isn’t much more (which it shouldn’t be), it’s not going to do any harm. Alternatively, go with 512 and add another 512 at a later date.

BTW, I bet your memory is upgradeable in your current PC.

 

[Cheesy Mike]

XP (or even Windows 98 on older PCs) runs lots and lots of processes in the background even when nothing is happening on the PC. Memory is the single most effective upgrade you can apply to a system. If you don't have enough memory but choose to run more programs in memory than you actually have space for, the excess is written to a swapfile on hard disk. All well and good, but if you then need to get that bit of memory written to disk it has to be read back again and something else needs to be written to disk to make space for it. Reading and writing disks is thousands of times slower than using memory so your PC performance drops through the floor.

Your current PC might be fully stacked with memory, but you can still rip out what is there and install all new. Crucial have a nice upgrade tool at www.crucial.com/uk - just click the Memory Advisor on the front page.

As for new PCs, I wouldn't run with less than 512MB. 1024MB (1GB) is even better.

Mike

 

[trotsky]

Banger

We've successfully run 1.7GHz PCs with XP and 512MB RAM - I'm just in the process of upgrading an old 1GHz PC which happily ran Windows XP in 768MHz.

What memory does your machine take? If it is PC100 I have a couple of strips of 256MB hanging around that you could have for nowt which might help. If nothing else you could run a very nice Linux based system on a machine of that spec.

I've just bought a couple of Dells with 1GB of memory for work - one of the guys who got them wants another 512MB for his and he has a good reason for it too, damn him - but 1GB will do everything you want. I would suggest checking whether the new PC has one 1GB memory module or two 512MB memory modules - the former is a little more expensive but makes any future upgrade that is necessary cheaper.

 

[bandit]

Is Ram that important

It is to a Sheep!

 

[Fanum]

I'm with Dr Alf......I bet it is upgradeable Banger.

Open the box up and tell us what sort of motherboard it is......it'll be printed on the PCB somewhere, and will probably be a combination of 5-8 letters and or numbers.

Let us know and we'll see what we can do.


But if you're planning on going new, then yep, 512 will do but as the price difference is minimal, get a gig (1024) and you'll be much more futureproof for when you start stuff like messing around with video etc.

You might want to peruse THIS SITE before you buy....it's where I'm going to get my new machine from in a month or so when I've got fed up with arguing the toss with the tax man.

 

[cookie]

...or use belarc to try & identify m/board without opening it up. board id's are sometimes on the bottom.

my 2p:

xp will run fine for normal office apps. & surfing on a 600Mhz pc with 256MB RAM.

a 1.7Mhz pc with 512MB RAM will do almost anything bar CAD design progs, video editing & modern games at resolutions above about 1024 x 768 . i have one & it's fine.

i don't think you'll ever notice the difference in day to day use of having 1GB of RAM over 512MB.
no harm done fitting it, but could be OTT for what you need. what do you intend doing with the PC.

there is no such thing as futureproofing a pc. by the time any serious upgrading is needed to a pc, the whole feckin' lot is usually obsolete anyway.

just my opinion.

ps. i once had to troubleshoot the memory on my pc & had to use all the RAM. you would not believe how much stuff i had to open to get it to use the swap file.

 

[Banger]

I'm with Dr Alf......I bet it is upgradeable Banger.

Open the box up and tell us what sort of motherboard it is......it'll be printed on the PCB somewhere, and will probably be a combination of 5-8 letters and or numbers.

Let us know and we'll see what we can do.


But if you're planning on going new, then yep, 512 will do but as the price difference is minimal, get a gig (1024) and you'll be much more futureproof for when you start stuff like messing around with video etc.

You might want to peruse THIS SITE before you buy....it's where I'm going to get my new machine from in a month or so when I've got fed up with arguing the toss with the tax man.

Thanks i can upgrade to 256 ram and thats it. Not really worth it but atleast i know.

My new one will have 1gb..... just to make up for my waisted time on this one

 

[longdog]

I at this present time have 128ram which runs this 1.7 P.C like treacle! I have gone through everything on start up etc etc but the Computer check came up with to low on vertual memory.

I see that the minimum now is 256 but i dont want to get trapped again and am thinking of 512 or even 1024!

Once bitten.... as they say.

Is 1024 sensible for the future on a 3gb P.C? or is it a bit OTT!

Hi Banger, I'd be VERY surprised if you couldn't either add another stick of ram or replace the 128 K stick with 256 or 512.

Personally, I would go for 512K minimum on a machine running XP and 1 Meg if you can afford it. It is the single most effective way to improve the efficiency of a PC.

One caveat for users of "older" machines running Win 98 or 98 SE. It doesn't really like running more than 512K of ram, (but not impossible).