mem upgrade?

PooMan UK said:

Hiya Yamaha pal.

One of the problems with allot of graphics packages PS being one of them is they use a scratch disk. This is used by Photoshop to replace physical RAM. This is defined in Photoshop's preferences. To work best the program needs free space on the scratch disk equal to about 4 times your file size. If you do not have this much free space you may get an inadequate memory message while editing your picture. Normally it is best to either have a very large hard drive to work with or have a separate disc for use in image editing.
If you’ve got 4GB and are still hitting the scratch disk, you will probably see significant benefit from adding RAM. You could get up to a 40% speedup when working on large files that hit the scratch disk by increasing RAM from 4GB to 6GB.

Hope this helps a bit

the problem is that i have 3 gig and i think my laptop can only hold 4? can someone help me confirm this? if this is not the case i would happily go buy 2 4gig chips, clean up the HD and call it good!

also, on the scratch disk, is it better to have the scratch disk be a deferent disk then that which the picture is saved on? so would it be better to have all my pics on an external drive, and have the itnernal drive be the scratch disk? or vise versa? i have a laptop with only one drive so that would be my only option.

in the third post it was listed what i have but ill have to go fill the info in on my profile as well. thanks for reminding me! so if i go get 2 4gig sticks and replace what i have. get an external drive and set it as the scratch disk as well as clean up my internal drive should i get a lot better performance? or just a little? does the scratch disk need to be empty? or can i set it as the same external drive im going to try and store the bulk of my media files?

also, thanks for all the help everyone!

PooMan UK said:

Pal your lappy might not be able to use 2x 4gb sticks you will have to check your specs. The scratch disk doesn't have to be empty but the more free space you have the better, and cleaning up your main disk is always a good thing.

sorry, i meant to say 2 2gig sticks

cluberti said:

According to HP, that laptop can handle 4GB RAM at a maximum, so probably 2x2GB.
Product Specifications - HP Customer Care (United States - English)

Which also means that unless the bios has the memory remap option in it, then adding a 4th gig won't make any difference as it will still be limited to around 3 GB regardless of whether he runs 64 bit or 32 bit Windows.

I've problems with RAM myself, ,, have custom sys with I7 920 and have used multiple $500 video cards, ssd drives and no matter what "resources" I throw into the computer, with 12 gigs ram(6 sticks), 4 gigs seem to be researved for the O/S(operating system) and 8 gigs show up when checking available Ram... but the problem is that when utilizing windows task manager when the computer freezes up, it shows the lock up around 4 gigs in memory usage...
Towit.. going by all reporting window tools, it seems that 4 gigs of ram out of the 12 are not used.
I use some complex algorithms in a stock trading program that I run in multiple. It would be indicative of needing much more ram/chips maybe a server setup except for that whole thing with not showing in "task", more than 4 gigs ram memory when lockup happens. Some how, there is a limitation on access the system has towards ram built into windows 7.