should i upgrade RAM?

[blipblop]

someone locally is selling 2 x 1 gig sticks of pc3200 crucial for 104 dollars. Here are my specs.

Chaintech VNF-4
A64 3000+
320gig HD
ati X700 (don't game much)
2 x 512 corsair

I know DDR is dead... but for the price and I can resell the 2 X 512 at it might be about 40 bucks. What do you guys think?

 

[ScrapSilicon]

Originally posted by: blipblop
someone locally is selling 2 x 1 gig sticks of pc3200 crucial for 104 dollars. What do you guys think?

run memtest86 on the sticks before finalizing the deal

 

[conlan]

What do you use the computer for?

An additional 1Gb of Ram will speed up intensive apps, such as games, photoshop etc.

 

[Ultralight]

Is that Crucial Ballistix PC 3200? And I fully agree with conlan; another Gig would be good.

What RAM do you have now?

 

[Lemon law]

The missing spec is do you now or will you run Vista in the future. The point being---Vista can efficiently use every bit of ram it gets---and with XP in a non intensive use area, a gig alone is probably past the point of diminishing returns.

And if you can run Memtest86 before you buy---because more ram that generates errors is worthless.--especially if its non-ECC. But credit ScrapSilicon for that.

 

[secretanchitman]

go for it. 2GB is great for anything nowadays,

 

[blipblop]

I run 2 x 512 pc3200 of corsair... I don't play games or anything on it. Just multitask and programs and things in general. Photoshop once in a while. I probably won't be upgrading to Vista for a while and I run WinXP PRo right now

 

[blipblop]

they're like 45 minutes one way though... I don't want to go there, run back and say it's ok.... Worse comes to worse I can RMA them to crucial?

 

[Ultralight]

I don't think - and I could be very wrong here - that Crucial would accept an RMA because you were not the original owner. Again, I could be wrong.


Right now ZipZoomFly is having Corsair 's ValueSelect memory in 1 Gig sticks on sale for $77.00

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Home.jsp

I think I would feel better about buying brand new RAM for $154 rather than used RAM for $104 plus a 45 minute drive one way, even though Crucial makes very good RAM. Plus ZZF has free shipping and unless you are in California, no tax.

 

[blipblop]

I'm not sure how crucials RMA are. I've RMAed my corsair a couple of times and they never asked if i was the original owner. I guess 40 dollars and peace of mind might be worth it in the long run.

 

[Ultralight]

One other thing, the reason I asked what model of Crucial they were, i.e., Ballistix, is because Crucial was having serious problems with their PC4000 and PC3200 in Ballistix a year ago and more.

It became so bad that they removed their 2x1 Gig kits from the market. Failures were occuring after 6 months of use. Crucial makes GREAT memory. My 512 megs of 133 in my old Pentium3 system that is over 6 years old is running strong and my batch of 2 gigs of Ballistix 3200 in a 4x512 configuration has beenm running trouble free for almost a year.

I say all this to agree that an extra $40 for peace of mind would be a good deal in the long run.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: blipblop
someone locally is selling 2 x 1 gig sticks of pc3200 crucial for 104 dollars. Here are my specs.

Chaintech VNF-4
A64 3000+
320gig HD
ati X700 (don't game much)
2 x 512 corsair

I know DDR is dead... but for the price and I can resell the 2 X 512 at it might be about 40 bucks. What do you guys think?

unless you are using more than 1GB, 2GB is useless to you. pull up task manager and see how much ram you peak out at the end of a day of normal - heavy usage. i use my rig in sig for ps, illustrator, golive, office, internet - all kinds of stuff and the only thing that pushes it over 1GB is bf2 - up to 1.7GB sometimes, but if i didn't game bf2 on it i would be fine with 1GB or if i didn't run the gpu i do i could run less than 2GB.

just today since i turned on my rig this morning i have only peaked at 450MB of ram usage so you may put the $100 into a saving box for a new rig for the future. again, imho

 

[blipblop]

for some reason, i have 61 processes running right now. I have about 150mb RAM remaining and I just have an instance of opera open right now and 3 work documents, trillian, msn messenger. I think I may just need to reformat as my XP is getting sluggish. Haven't done it for about 3 years.

 

[conlan]

Originally posted by: blipblop
for some reason, i have 61 processes running right now. I have about 150mb RAM remaining and I just have an instance of opera open right now and 3 work documents, trillian, msn messenger. I think I may just need to reformat as my XP is getting sluggish. Haven't done it for about 3 years.

61? :Q

Some folks never reformat Windows, i'm not of 'em. We usually reformat at least once a year, especially since were constantly upgrading.

 

[blipblop]

yea, i use to reformat, now i've had this machine for a while and never did so. My 4 year old dell 600M with one of the original 1.3Pentium M's (banias?) seems to be faster than my desktop.