Benefits of additional RAM on XP system.

I have been planning to upgrade the RAM from 1GB to 4GB on our Dell M1210 running windows XP (T7200 2.0). The main reason for the upgrade is that the start ups seem to be slower than I remember them and it seemed like the logical thing to upgrade. I have been now reading that RAM upgrades beyond 1GB on the XP OS tend to make little to no difference for boot up and routine tasks (meaning no heavy photoshop, etc). Is this true?? Should I just try to stick with optimizing programs, etc and save my money?

 

If you are going to do any RAM upgrade, if your tasks warrant it, I would just go to 2gb. You will notice a pretty large difference in Photoshop and like programs, and it just makes everything a little more zippy.

I wouldn't go to 4gb's considering you have Windows XP installed, and if it's the 32-bit version, it will only use 3gb's. I also wouldn't go to 4gb unless you are doing some heavy video editing or 3d modeling.

 

Even if you're running 64-Bit XP it will not recognize the full 4GB(because of your processor). I agree try it out with 2GB then decide whether or not to go to 3GB.

 

Yea basically there is almost no need for 3 or 4gigs in XP; unless your doing something very resource intensive, and even then like he said; anything above 3 gigs would be a waste unless you have a XP 64

 

Actually, his processor, a Merom, is 64bit, meaning it can theoretically address up to 2^64 bytes, so he definitely use 4GB of RAM. Just get Vista64, which is what I'm using right now and he'll be fine.

 

If you have more than 2GB of RAM in an XP system, typicallly the system will recognize it with the Physical Addressing Extensions enabled. Whether or not that translates to a practical difference in performance is another question.

-David

 

2GB is enough for XP, just reformat that computer and install the latest drivers and updates, you'll be fine.

 

I agree that what would be most beneficial to you would be to reformat your harddrive, that will address the sluggish system performance compared to earlier on (unless it is due to mechanical failure). Most people agree that the RAM sweet spot for XP is 1 gig, though you might consider upgrading to 1.5 gigs (cheapest RAM upgrade) if you have integrated graphics.

 

Indeed the processor is 64-Bit, but it's the older Intel 945 chipset and it only recognizes a little over 3GB even with a 64-Bit OS. The current Santa Rosa processors(965 chipset) will recognize the full 4GB with a 64-Bit OS.

 

Any 32bit OS will not see more then about 3.3GB of RAM. To see the full amount you would need a 64bit OS - which has its own issues!

I agree with the above - go for 2GB for now. Its more then enough for XP.

Also, bear in mind, adding RAM means that programs have somewhere to store temporary data, making them a little faster. Adding RAM WILL NOT make your system boot up any faster - this is down to teh startup programs etc.

Over time, as you add software and browse the Internet etc, more and more software gets started up as Windows boots. A lot of software does this by default - adds a component in to start up alongside Windows. All your taskbar icons, for example, start with windows, slowing down the overall boot up time.

What you need to do is a system cleanup.

Start with cleaning up your C drive - run a disk cleanup and a disk defrag to make sure everything is optimized.

Then check the startup folder in the Start Menu, and you can safely delete most of the stuff, if not everything out of there. Acrobat Reader for example, usually adds a shortcut in there by default, so that acrobat reader loads alongside Windows at startup, meaning when you finally open Acrobat yourself it loads quicker.

After this check for processes running at startup. Type 'msconfig' in the Run dialog box and click the Startup tab. Remove any stuff from there that you dont need to launch at startup. If you unsure of anything its best to leave it or check what it is first on the net etc.

The above should speed boot up time a little more.

 

Anyone with Acrobat Reader installed should seriously consider using Sumatra PDF or Foxit reader instead. Both are free, very small and work perfectly. Sumatra PDF is also available as a portable app ( http://portableapps.com/ for details).

I dual boot XP and Vista and XP with 2GB is an absolute dream to use. With everything loaded after startup, XP uses around 340GB. that leaves over 1.5GB free for programs and data. 4GB would be serious overkill.

Vista + 4GB is about as nice as XP with 2GB.

 

Vista takes advantage of additional RAM better than XP does - it uses Superfetch and other processes to utilize the extra RAM that your usual apps will benefit from. XP on the other hand doesn't do anything to take advantage of extra RAM (other than just being able to run more programs, use the memory when needed etc). In other words, XP won't proactively do things to speed up your system with the newfound RAM like Vista will.

 

One reason to have more RAM would be a possibility to load your OS completely into RAM.

Some linux distros (e.g. puppy, knoppix, kanotix, DSL) can do it.

There is a shareware "Diskless Angel" which does it for XP. I haven't tried it myself yet, but I plan to.

I also tried a RAM disk program to make a virtual disk in RAM and to run
another OS from it using vmware. However, to my surprise, I haven't observedan increase of the speed of the guest OS. Can't explain that.

Those experiments for fun require lots of RAM! The idea was to have a lightning fast guest OS running from ram inside Windows. Still thinking about it.

 

Oh My!

 

That's pretty cool idea, tell us when you have got it working, and you may perhaps write a guide for us.

But I thought with a registry hack, and system settings XP will pretty much keep most of its kernels within the RAM without ever paging it into the harddrive. Could there be anymore performance gain from using diskless angel?

Also, the idea of Diskless angel seems logical but it isn't practical, for example, on the website it says virus will be delete upon reboot, fair enough, nothing in the ram gets saved. However, what happens if you need to update a system file or install a new program that requires some new file be placed inside the system folders.. then I guess it won't work?!

@XP1330
Nice catch. xD

 

Err, umm, whoops

 

^^^
rofl

 

I'm very wary of RAM disk and RAM saver programs. They generally harm performance overall. Microsoft may not be much loved for the quality of their code, but I can guarantee that their best programmers spent a lot of time planning and tweaking the memory manager in the Windows kernel.

It actually does a very good job, even in XP which is pretty old. Windows may report e.g. 1.5GB free but it's probably filled that 'free' space with cached data from the HD.

As you load things from HD, Windows keeps a copy of the data in RAM. It still marks the RAM as 'free' because if a program calls for a block of RAM to use, Windows just forgets about the cached data and lets the program use the RAM. As you load more and more data from HD, Windows retires the oldest cached data in favour of the newest.

VMWare is very clever in how it uses RAM. It has to be. If it jsut played dumb, it would hurt client OS performance. Trying to tweak VMWare by using 3rd party RAM caching or RAM disk programs is likely not going to help!

 

I have 1 question on RAM.

Most desktop units benefit from having a matched pair of memory installed

When I configured my dell the memory box even says...

Two memory slots. Max memory capacity 4 GB DDR2-SDRAM. Note: In order to get dual channel bandwidth capability, both slots must contain memory modules and they must be of the same size and configuration

Hence the usual 2 or 4 Gb size options.

and given Crucial do a 2 x 2GB for £73 it isn't exactly going to break the bank....

2, 3 or 4 ? (is 3 1 x 2Gb and 1x1Gb ?)

Thoughts ?