What Will Extra RAM Do For Me?

I opened up the bottom of my laptop yesterday, and noticed a place for an additional component that I didn't have. Apparently it's a place where I could put in an additional RAM card.

Now, I have tried many times to understand it, but I just can't understand what all of the different physical components of a computer do what. If I put in an additional RAM card, just for instance say another 4GB one like the one I have, what would that do for me?

Would loading screens on games end faster? Would games run more smoothly?

I have a program called LEGO Digital Designer, where I can build virtual models with realistic virtual bricks. When I have a lot of bricks in the model, and am adjusting my view or copying sections with lots of bricks, it slows down. Would RAM help with that?

If RAM won't help, (now this is probably a REALLY dumb question, but worth a shot) can something else like a graphics card fit into the same slot?

Thanks!

Okay, this post was extremely helpful. I guess what I'll do next is keep that performance monitor open and see if my RAM usage is hitting 4GB when my programs are slowing down.

Thanks!

Adding 4 more GB of RAM will drain the battery a bit faster. So only add RAM if you really need it.

I'll toss in a bit more info:
When you first start the computer, the operating system and some 3rd party apps will load in RAM to run. When you start another app, it takes time to get the info from the hard drive and into RAM. When you exit that app, the RAM that the app was using might be marked as standby (which means that other apps can use that RAM now). If you start the same app again, you might notice that it loads much quicker than it did the first time that you loaded it. That quick load time is probably due to the app still being in RAM in the standby category. The more RAM that you have, the more apps you can keep in that standby category.



The image above shows that I have a lot of apps in the standby category. I'm using 4.7GB because of the apps that I have open.

PlasticTopHat said:

Okay, this post was extremely helpful. I guess what I'll do next is keep that performance monitor open and see if my RAM usage is hitting 4GB when my programs are slowing down.

Thanks!

Actually you don't want the gauge to hit or even approach 4 GB. Once that happens you are already well past the point where performance is impaired. The situation can happen where the system is under heavy memory pressure and applications are desperate for more memory and the gauge will still be under 4 GB.

Memory usage is always under the control of the system memory manager with the goal of maximizing overall system performance. To accomplish this it will try to maintain a reasonable value of available memory. This is the part of the gauge that appears to be unused but that isn't really the case. Much of this (or even all) will be in the system cache (labeled as "Cached" in Task Manager) and contributes greatly to system performance. Memory labeled as "Free" should be as low as possible, zero being the optimum value. That isn't always possible with large amounts of memory.

This is all VERY complex.

For optimum performance I would like to see available memory at 50% or even higher. If the gauge is over 50% for much of the time performance is likely going to be at least somewhat impaired. 8GB RAM is about right for a 64 bit OS with typical workloads. With 4 GB RAM performance will likely be impaired at least some of the time. For particularly heavy workloads you would need more but that is unusual.

Edit: The screensnhot in post #4 is a good example of what you want. Standby memory is high and free memory is low. Not zero but close. Cached memory is also high and that is good. If usage was much higher than this performance would be impaired.