New
#31
Download Portable for Windows, DOS.
Extract to a folder and run HWiNFO64.exe
It's a portable, doesn't need to be installed.
Under memory you'll find all the memory specs. Compare both, old and new.
more than 8GB RAM?
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New #32
Well there you go, you just figured it out yourself that you need minimum 12GB RAM for given load. At 8GB, you were starving your system. Browsers and websites are memory hog these days.
Your folder issue might just be because of too much files in one folder.
More RAM is certainly not the issue and even benchmark is about same in dual channel configuration.
Give the system 16GB it deserves.
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New #33
Also lets not forget that 2nd Gen i5 can do this much only.
Updrade to 7th/8th Gen and you'll certainly see the difference.
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New #34
- windows 7 seems to eat up any RAM thrown at it, but in this case, it didn't actually improve it.
something tells me that if I install 32GB RAM, it'll use up 20GB.
- Megahertz. thanks for the link. I'll run that utility with different RAM configs, when I reboot with different RAM configs.
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New #35
In any intelligently designed operating system, within reasonable limits, the more memory you have, the more the OS will use. This is the way it should be. Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX have all done this for many years. Those limits are heavily dependent on the workload, which varies widely.
Any system with more than 90% memory usage has a serious shortage which will impair performance. At 94% usage, as shown in post #9, the system is starving for memory. Most of the remainder is not free but is in use and contributes to good performance. A memory gauge that showed as used this would be near 100% most of the time and would be neither useful or interesting.
The system memory manager will always try to maintain a reasonable balance between in use and available memory. Remember, available does not mean free. The higher the usage the harder the memory manager will have to work and the less satisfactory will be the results. I like to see available memory in the 50% range or better most of the time. Less and there will likely be some impairment of performance.
Post #9 shows heavy memory usage by the Firefox and Chrome browsers. And it is actually worse than that. The "Memory (Private working set)" column shown does not show the full memory usage of a process. Full usage is even higher.
More memory will improve overall system performance. Will it improve explorer performance with large folders? That is a different matter. You can't expect that a memory upgrade will eliminate all performance problems. That is not how things work in the real world. The NTFS file system has no problem with huge numbers of files but not so for Windows Explorer and most other file managers. What hurts performance in the details listing is the need to sort the display listing and Windows Explorer will always sort. The on disk file structure is not touched by this sorting, it is only for display purposes.
But it is much worse when showing thumbnails. Displaying the thumbnail requires reading it from the image file. If the image comes from a phone or digital camera a special thumbnail image will usually be present in the file and that will help a lot. Images from other sources may not have it. In that case the entire image file would need to be read and that takes time. This is particularly bad with a conventional drive, much better with an SSD. Windows Explorer will only read the thumbnails for images that are actually being displayed, not the entire list. These images will go into a thumbs.db cache file in the folder which helps a lot. But of course with a new folder this will not be present.
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New #36
Thumbs up for a lot of good points by @LMiller7
To OP: I would re-run your benchmarks but this time create a set of 45 open firefox tabs plus 25 open chrome tabs and have them open in the background when you run your benchmark.
Also regarding graphics, make sure you have 256MB or higher for dedicated graphics memory set in your bios.
To add onto LMiller7's point about a good operating system - windows is good at figuring out how to use up your memory in a good way, which leads to better performance than just leaving it empty. And the opposite is true of chrome and firefox. They hog everything they can and doing so degrades other programs.
For the fastest explorer experience do not use thumbnails and do not customize sort. The default sort is alphabetical and windows remembers that order so that even though the files are not alphabetical on the disk, if you always use the default sort of alphabetical you should get an instantaneous display of your files even when opening a large folder. OR maybe windows does not actually remember the alphabetical sort and just recomputes it so quickly it seems instantaneous - whatever, its still the fastest. Also set all folders to "general items" as their default view
Folder View - Set a Default for All Folders
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New #37
When a program reads an NTFS folder list it will be in alphabetical order. This order is very critical to the file system operation. FAT file systems use the simple start at the beginning and look at each entry until you find what you looking for lookup method. NTFS uses a method more like the old number guessing game which is much faster for very large folders. But for this to work the order must be very predictable. This order is language and locale independent. As the users locale may have different rules about sort order the file manager will still have to go through the sort procedure. But since most sorting methods are very fast if the original order is close this should take little time.
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New #39
right. hwinfo screenshots, with lots of numbers.
two numbers that I noticed,
Refresh Cycle Time tRFC: 8GB total - 107T. 16GB total - 174T
Minimum Refresh Recovery Time Delay tRFCmin: 8GB total - 160ns. 16GB total - 260ns
my Fujitsu Lifebook Bios really doesn't have a lot of settable options for memory, MHz speed, that's about it. both 8GB and 16GB running at 665MHz (DDR3-1333, running at the right speed)
I've been running 8GB for the past month, and it really didn't feel slow. it was digging into between 6 and 10 GB in the swap file. just rebooted and changed to 16GB config, and....yeah. it definitely doesn't feel faster.
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