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How much memory should I get in a new computer?

R

rw120555

Golden Member
I'll be buying a new computer soon, probably around 1.7GHZ Pentium. Operating system will likely be Win98 with a possible upgrade to XP in a few months.

I will get at least 128MB memory, but I'm wondering how much, and under what conditions, you gain by getting more than that. In the past, I've read that getting too much memory can actually slow your system down, but I don't know if that is still true.

My most heavy-duty uses are the analysis of large data sets (million+ records sometimes) using statistical software like SPSS. Some of these jobs can take hours to run on a 400 Mhz Pentium. I imagine a 1.5GHZ Pentium will help a lot, but does more memory help much on data-intensive tasks? More generally, when does memory above 128 MB tend to be really helpful, and at what point do you hit diminishing returns?

Thanks for any input. RW
 
When you are considering the cost of RAMBUS, the point of diminishing returns happens very quickly. Most of the time P4 systems don't have much more than 256 Mb of RAM max. With the low cost of DDR and SDR RAM it doesn't hurt to go up to say 512 Mb of RAM with Windows 98. Any more than that and Windows 98 begins to have problems. I would suggest that you try to get as much as you can up to 512 Mb because the more you have the more quickly the information is provided to the processor so that it can be kept running full time on those intensive tasks.
 
With Win98, there is probably no point in going above 256 MB. If you're using Win2000, 256 is good, 512 is excellent, and 768 is even better 🙂 I have 512 MB in my Win2K box right now, and it never has to touch the swap file.
 
an article pointed to above 256 has diminishing returns, though still yielding benefits. but with new operating systems, that is no longer true, ie, w2k or winxp. i recommend 256 as min for win2k and up. but i would eagerly tell you go get 512 MB.

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too bad you can't wait until next year when the p4 will have DDR support with respect to the core logic chipset.

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i strongly urge you to get an athlon with DDR. but if you have to have intel.... =(
 
with any operating system, the more RAM you have the better. that 256MB max for win9x is stupid. the bug is with 512MB for the win9x kernel.... =P

the operating system is not the only thing that can use memory...
 
Thanks much everybody. I think I'll get at least 256MB and maybe as much as 512MB. This discussion makes me very tempted to try Win2K, but I know the local support people will disavow me if I do such a wild and crazy thing (We're mostly NT or Win98, but you're welcome to buy whatever color of Dell Optiplex you can find for running those on). But, they'll have to support XP sooner or later, and hopefully that will make more effective use of the memory than Win98 does. RW
 
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