How does one know when one needs more ram ?

How can I know if I need to add Ram, are there "signs" ?

And, what tells me that if my laptop "drags", it means I need Ram and it's not the Proccessor ?

Thanks !


Lenovo N100 - 1 Gig of ram, T5500 duel core.

 

RAM is constantly used by any process running. The processor is only used when the process is performing a task. RAM is used by a process constantly. Here is what I would do if I were you, do a clean boot on your computer, then press SHIFT + CTRL + ESC (I assume this is windows) and view your commit charge. If it is using up more than half of your available then it is time to replace RAM. Here's the thing, you will ALWAYS increase performance by upgrading ram. While yes it might seem like your processor is slow, it is usually not equitable as processor price have a huge price jump for little performance jump. I would suggest you add another 1 gig stick, it will increase your performance for sure. Let me know if this helped and if I can be of any further assistance.

 

its sort of complicated. depending on what you are doing it could be your processor, but most likely jeremy nailed this one on the head.

i should add that adding more ram wont ALWAYS increase your performance. it entirely depends on the task at hand. its certainly possible that you legitimately need other components.

however, with a t5500 and 1 gig of ram, its pretty easy to recommend another gig of ram. that single upgrade is not only cheap by comparison to anything else you could do, but it is also the most likely to give you a considerable performance increase.

of course, if you described more of what you were doing, it would be even easier to pinpoint what is going on.

 

I meant overall performance. Which in my experience adding a stick of RAM ALWAYS increased overall performance.

Anyway, o1d, what do you have in there now? Is it two 512 MB sticks? or one 1 GB stick?