Performance benefit from doubling RAM

My Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop (running WinXP Pro) has a 2GHz Pentium M with 1GB RAM. If I were to replace its 2 x 512MB memory modules with 2 x 1GB modules (the maximum for this laptop), would I see any appreciable improvement in overall performace?

 

Aaron, that would largely depend on how you use your Inspiron (ie., the apps that you typically run). If and when you use RAM-demanding apps (Photoshop is but one example of such apps), you would realize a very noticeable gain in performance after upgrading to 2GB RAM. On the other hand, for activities such as internet browsing, email, etc., I don't believe the upgrade would provide much of a difference in performace that you would notice.

 

Experts will give you better advice than I can, but it seems to
me that depends on how much free RAM you have available on average,
and your Pagefile parameters.

Back when I was increasing RAM in my machines, I used

tinyresmeter

to monitor free RAM.

 

Hi Aaron,

I completely agree with appster's comments - the answer to your question depends on the type of applications you run on your laptop. That said, should you ever decide to move from WinXP to Vista, that OS will definitely 'appreciate' more RAM. Finally, RAM is so inexpensive nowadays that I would venture to guess you can accomplish that upgrade for under $60, so why not go for it?

Jo Ann

 

Its a general moaning that photoshop CS and up has very bad memory handling,many complain about PS not releasing memory and big memory leaks,in my case i have 4 gig of memory on 32 bit windows,and allocated 60 % RAM for PS but ran easily out of memory with a 50 mb imagefile and some layers,remember we'r talking about 4 gig RAM,but a simple digital file from my camera editing in PS and four or five layers brings PS to a halt,i did everything possible to fix, i contacted Adobe read all over their forums but sofor no solution.No No its not Adobe's fault,the more then 800.000 people who complain doing something wrong !!

So it depends,using 3D and video editing app. with a neat memory handling will benefit with more RAM installed.
But don't use from the Adobe Suite,they are all affected by this bad memory handling.

 

Huupi, In addressing Aaron's question, I used Photoshop as an example of a 'RAM-hungry' app, there are of course, many others.

Aaron, I would agree with Jo Ann's sentiment about 'maxing-out' your laptop's RAM at today's RAM bargains. In that regard, I usually go to crucial.com for RAM upgrades. They offer quality RAM at very good prices and their support is terrific.

 

Best way to speed up your rig is adding more RAM,in general it benefit most all applications.
Memory ''hungry'' is't the problem,just add more memory,but critical is how memory intensive app.handle their own allocated memory,and i must say that PS is not the most proficient at it.

 

1gb is genrally the sweet spot with xp. 2gb is nice but genrally not needed for xp.
normaly the slow part of notebooks is the hard drive speed.

 

what is the cost ? if it is not too great I would go for the 2 gig.