how much ram is overkill-affect page file

I currently have 1024mb ram on my xp pro athlon 3000. Would 2048 be a waste? How does it impact the paging file if at all? I'm not a gamer or artist. Would it make the pc faster?

 

You can bring up your System Monitor or whatever it is called in WindowsXP (I use Win9 and keep track of how much you are constantly using, that would tell you if you need more. Unless you do gaming, video, or heavy duty graphics I find it hard to believe you would need more than 1gig, good luck.

Acadia

 

I'm a pretty heavy gamer myself and I never find my memory usage (specs in my sig) past 30% or so even with page files at max size and all game options cranked up as well. My processor slows me down way before the memory.

 

the bigger the ram the bigger the pagefile in xp

 

you're not a gamer nor an artist, obviously you dont do some video editing or some sort. 2gigs of memory i think is an overkill if you dont have any use for it. remember "unused memory is a wasted memory". and it wont make your pc any faster than it is right now unless of course you do some heavy graphics, but you probably wont notice the difference.

 

I'm a professional graphic and 3d artist running various video programs also.

Running an XP SP1 system with an nVidia XGL 900 128mb on an Athlon XP 3000 with 1gb SDRAM. Most of the time the page file is around 300mb and I give it 800mb total page file size.

 

Hello Todd -

This is what works for my Pentium-4 xp system with 1 GB 400mhz RAM,
I have my page file set to a constant 832 MB size. I would love to have 2 GB, and report back on if there is a difference!

Just to cover the bases, microsoft recommends 1.5x your amount of RAM as the pagefile, but i received the advice (actually here on wilders) that i would probably benefit by making my page file smaller. The reasoning as I understood it is that for most people, if you increase the amount of RAM you decrease the need for virtual memory (aka pagefile). RAM is obviously faster than the pagefile. You can change the default setting for page file, as you may know by....

(start > Control Panel > system > advanced >perfomance (button) > than advanced tab)......(or right click my computer > properties....is faster)

that still does not answer the question how much do you need. Well, i use this as a guide, let me know if it makes sense to you:

If you are really lucky, you have a defragment program by Raxco called "Perfect Disk-6". if you do you can set it to defragment your page file at each boot up. when you reboot you see a screen not unlike the chkdsk screen. it says "defragmenting the pagefile" _ _% done. I figure....
if it is done instantly - the pagefile was not fragmented, therefore not heavily used.
if is fragmented, and defragments quickly, you might try incrementing the pagefile size up.
if it is fragmented and it takes along time defragmenting, you can imagine what the performance would have been had you not defragmented, and probably the pagefile is too big.

I imagine most people would say, "how long could it take to defragment a pagefile? If you do video, and if you have been using a 3 or 4 GB size, you would not believe how long it can take...i know i cant.

that said i use a constant 832mb. maybe 10 percent of the time it defrags most of the time not. I like to fool around with video and images, and i KNOW i would benefit because i probably could all but eliminate the pagefile....

...also you usually know when you don't have enough RAM....does your computer have to be rebooted every so often or stuff just sort of comes to a halt? This computer started life as a 256 MB machine. It was flat out not enough. 1024 MB is alot 90% it is overkill. even to someone who's photoshop plug-ins dirrectory is over 600 MB is size! But 10% of the time it pays for itself.

one other comment. i have heard (not sure why) that when you start using memory chips that are 512 mb in size it is more important they be matched. you see them selling matched sets of high end memory.

I guess i'm curious ... is this really important? mine arent matched, but they are both much faster the 400 my 400 Mhz FEB so i am guessing no.