Solved Will extra 4gb of ram show much of a difference in speed

[gary777]

Hi guys, running w-7 500gb hdd 4gb ram. By looking at the shot of performance in the windows task manager, computer is running ok but of course not as fast as when new because of the added files. Will adding another 4gb of memory show any real difference.

thanks Gary

 

[paul1149]

If that snap is typical of your use, you already have plenty of RAM to spare. Check it at maximum usage if not. Otherwise the biggest performance increase would be a SSD, or at least a hybrid HDD. Poor man's solution would be to optimize the existing drive regularly. Also check the perf stats in control panel to see how various elements compare.

 

[gary777]

Thanks Paul, pix is with no applications running, but all services running. SSD would be nice but computer is not worth that much. It is great working laptop, but it was one of the cheapest new Dell with W-7 in it I could find. Got it for a little over $300. I just thought for $60 or so if it would speed it up a bit, it would be worth it.

Any tips on how to optimize the HHD

Also " Also check the perf stats in control panel to see how various elements compare" I have no idea what you are talking about, could you be more specific.

Thank you

 

[paul1149]

YW, Gary. Also make sure the HDD has some empty space, otherwise fragging starts to take a big toll on speed.

 

[gary777]

I am only using maybe 20% of HDD

 

[gregrocker]

You want to up the RAM only when you watch the RAM usage constantly get ahead of the CPU getting close to 100% when the CPU isn't anywhere near that.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I have 4 GB of RAM and very rarely use more than 3.

Take a look at the memory tab of Performance Monitor within Task Manager. You'll see a graph like the one below. This pic is my system right now, with the following applications running: Photoshop with 10 TIFF files open, Media Monkey playing mp3s, Windows Media Player playing a video, Audacity recording audio, Pale Moon browser, Word, and Excel.

As you can see from the graph, I am using less than 2 GB at the moment, with 2108 MB available--represented by the blue segment in the graph. That's typical for me. More RAM would be pointless. I originally intended to probably add more when I built this PC, but when I saw my typical usage was so low, I used the money set aside for RAM to fund an SSD.

Unless your graph typically shows very little available RAM, I'd say there's no reason to add more.

 

[lehnerus2000]

I upgraded from 4GB to 8GB of RAM at the beginning of last year.
I'm glad I did because the price is now roughly double what I paid.

My WEI RAM score went from 5.9 to 7.4.

However I can't say that I noticed any overall improvement in performance.
The one exception is running VMs (which is the reason I wanted to get more RAM).

 

[AddRAM]

I for one, would definitely Add more RAM

 

[gary777]

I'll gonna check the price

 

[Digital Life]

About a year ago I upgraded my ram from 4 to 8 gig on my laptop I like to run Virtual Machines and noticed an improvement, But if all you are doing is surfing the web and watching videos you probably won't notice anything spectacular

 

[gary777]

Well, Dell wants $59 for their MEMORY & BB wants 44.95 for PNY-4gb DDR-3 SDRAM MEMORY. BB is just down the street. I compared the two specs and the speed of dell was 1600mhz PNY at BB was 1300mhz.

 

[AddRAM]

Get the fastest memory the MB will support. (use)

 

[gary777]

yeah, that's what I was thinking. 15 bucks is not going to break me...

 

[gregrocker]

This is the first time I've gotten to see AddRAM advise to Add RAM.