What difference would you see upgrading win2k from 128 Ram to 384 Ram...

[bluegi]

I currently have a duron 750 with 128 ram cl3..Here is my question..What difference in preformance would result from an addtional 256 Ram..

 

[oldfart]

Depends on the app. Anywhere from 0% to ummm...a lot more than 0%!!!

 

[RossMAN]

More importantly which OS are you using?

 

[BurnItDwn]

well ... when you multitask ... you wont notice nearly as much lag ...

i noticed a big difference from 128 to 256 ... and then i upgraded again to 640 .... and there was a noticable difference ....

check out your task manager from time to time ...

if you have plenty of free ram .. then dont worry about upgrading ...

but if you are within like 32mb of running out ... then its worthwhile getting more



you wont really notice any gain in framerates in games .. but you will be able to play a game, and leave a bunch of other tasks open with no noticable performance hit in the game.

 

[oldfart]

I noticed in games going from 128 to 256 and above gets rid of those little "hitches". Makes things nice and smooth. Ram is so cheap now there is no reason to be at at 128 meg. I'm running 384, and my swap space rarely, if ever gets used.

 

[bluegi]

opps...the os is win 2000...if it were you would you upgrade.

Paul

 

[Noriaki]

I went from 128MB to 384MB it was a definate improvement in Win2k.

 

[gnognugs]

Hehe, Rossman. He did say wintokay

I think 128MB is minimum in 2k. maybe 64

 

[Mixxen]

Yes, in win2k you will definitely see a performance jump. Everything loads faster, especially games. It also calms down the HD quite a bit.

 

[oldfart]

Your answer is here!

 

[Mixxen]

I think minimum for win2k is 32 megs. winxp will be 64 megs. At least 128 is recommended, and 256+ is MUCH better.

 

[NOX]

Wow oldfart, what the hell is that? That didn't look so great with my mozilla linux browser.

 

[oldfart]

It is a link to the Crucial web site. An audio MP3 of their "You need more memory my friend" radio spot.

 

[sygyzy]

I had 512 megs in my Windows Me box and it didn't do jack. I took out 256 and put it in my cheap backup Win 2K box for a total of 384 and it runs great. Windows 2000 does wonders managing and using memory while 9x series does jack. So yes, get that 256MB upgrade!

 

[xtreme2k]

HUGE IMPROVEMENT IN WIN2k

 

[Methusela]

I can tell you from experience that not only did my sandra memory benches go from around 390/415 to 480/540 from simply adding 256megs to my asus a7v, but everything performs MUCH faster. Apps open faster. Switching from window to window is MUCH faster. Audio encoding/decoding is MUCH smoother. Video (read: divx) is light-years easier on the system resources usage (like 15% easier on my duron 600@1050).

I was simply amazed at what the extra 256megs did. However, to test, i took out the old 128 megs and just used the Crucial 256meg 222 pc133 stick I had gotten. That was pretty much sufficient for everything I wanted to do, including winrar (700meg .bin+.cue files), nero 5.0.3.8, photoshop 6 all running at the same time. Before, with 128 megs, I couldn't multitask with any seriousness.

Also, from a gaming perspective, Rune, q3, NOLF, Clive Barker's Undying, and Diablo2 all run A LOT smoother. Much more smoothly, like NOTICEABLY!

Anyway, that's my two cents. I think 256megs of ram, at todays price of $89.24 delivered from Crucial is absolutely UNBEATABLE for a system upgrade to your win2k machine. Not only is it unbeatable, it's absolutely ESSENTIAL to getting the most out of your OS.

 

[RossMAN]

I totally agree with Methusela. When you can buy 256MB PC133 CAS2 RAM from Crucial.com (Micron) for $89.24 with free shipping.

You can't afford not to buy another 256MB RAM for under $90.

 

[bluegi]

i think i am sold..i am probally going to order 256 Ram tomorrow...thanks for all the input..

btw..should i take out my 128 Ram CL3 if i am going to put in 256 Ram CL2...

Paul

 

[Methusela]

The jury's out on that one, dood.

If your original ram can do 133mhz at cas 2 settings in the bios, w/o stability problems, go ahead.

However, you're really not going to see THAT much of a noticeable difference from cas3 to cas2 anyway, so you may just leave it in there and let your motherboard's SPD auto-detect and set a Cas Latency of 3 for the two sticks.

Although, you could always take the 128meg stick and sell it to a buddy for 2/3 of what you paid for it (regardless of the current pricing) and probably pay for the 256meg stick altogether

Good luck! Either way, 256megs+ of ram is great for win2k. HOWEVER: i've not found a suitable need for anything beyond 384megs for anything short of a server setting. For graphics, video, audio, gaming, and office work, you'll never see ANY improvement beyond 384megs of pc133 ram.

 

[marcio]

>For graphics, video, audio, gaming, and office work, you'll never see >ANY improvement beyond 384megs of pc133 ram.

hmmm, I don't know if I can believe you. My win2k task manager right now says 467244K used. I suspect that I could see some improvement if I had more than 384MB of pc133 RAM.

 

[Mustanggt]

I am running 256 megs of Ram and I threw in another 128 total 384 and MEM benchmarks droped way down for anyone that is intrested in mem speed.

 

[Mixxen]

Dam, wtf are you running?

I'm getting MEM Usage of 215456K, but I have these open...

Photoshop
Imageready
Illustrator
Internet Explorer 5.5 (4)
Word
Excel
Outlook
Easy CD Creator
Mediaplayer 7

When I'm only surfing the web I get mem usage of around 90M. Maybe if I run a game the mem usage will go up a lot, but I don't work and run games at the same time

 

[marcio]

My RAM was mostly being used by Photoshop (370MB+). I was doing a photo montage that will be printed 67" x 22". Opening all the 16MB+ scanned pictures uses a lot of RAM.

I should clarify that I have 512MB of RAM. Reading my previous post, some might think I'm saying that I have 384MB. 384MB is the number someone used as the ceiling, over which no one will never see any improvement.

 

[Mixxen]

Hmmm I see your point now...an average user will probably not benifit much from more than 256 megs o ram. But I'm sure power users will benefit from it.

 

[Diesel21]

I started out with 128 mb ram and is now at 512 mb.

128 -> 256: This was the crucial step, I feelt improvements immediatly. Not so much HD swapping
256 -> 512: Haven't feelt a thing since I installed another 256 mb ram. But I guess it will be good to have when Windows XP arrives