What's The Deal With The Incompatible 1GB Modules

[MoMeanMugs]

My PC has been recently been robbed by the turd burglar. It seems so sluggish, and a format didn't help the situation. I was looking at adding a 1GB stick to the 512MB I currently have. However, while looking on pricewatch, all the 1GB sticks have a notation that they only work with certain chipsets from Via and SIS. What's the deal with that? I haven't been researching PC hardware since about 2000 as I simply don't have time to keep up anymore (yeah, I get out of the house 7 days a week. ) I have an Intel PEBT2 that only has 2 DIMM sockets. I mine as well jump all the way in the pool the first go around. Can I pick up a 1GB stick and not worry about it, or am I stuck getting another 512er? This is probably a simple search topic, but hey I have to run out again soon.

 

[stevty2889]

Well it really depends a lot on what yu currently have in your system, what you are doing with it, but going over 1gig of ram usualy actualy hurts peformance for most applications, rather than helping, so you would be better getting another 512mb stick instead. But if you list the rest of your specs, and what you are using the computer for, then maybe we can figure out what will improve your performance the most.

 

[MoMeanMugs]

Well, it's an Intel board with the 845 chipset. I have the 2.8@533. I do a lot of multitasking between Corel and Microsoft products. Yes, you can read that as overbloated pigs. Everything gets pretty sluggish as I get too many hits on the pagefile. I usually hit about 1.2 GB of memory between the physical and the swapfile. I was thinking about setting up a ramdrive and using it as my pagefile, which would also save wear and tear on my hard drive. If this isn't feasible, then maybe it's time to get a new board. I've used systems with 1.5GB of RAM and I definitely didn't notice a slowdown.

 

[stevty2889]

You should be able to add a 1gig stick to that board with no problem then. May want to upgrade to an 800mhz FSB cpu, or a 3.06ghz(533FSB with hyperthreading) so you can use hyperthreading as well, that will help a good bit with the multitasking. Since you are getting about 1.2gb of memory usage, having 1.5gig of ram may actualy be pretty helpful to you.