Will Getting 1.5 GB of Ram (3x 512's) Make my Alt-Tabs "lag-less" ?

Rip the Jacker

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2004
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Hello.

I currently have 512MB of ram and I'm gonna replace THIS STICK with 3x IDENTICAL models of TwinMos DDR400 512MB sticks of Ram for $55 each (165 total).

If I do this, will it "perfect" or "near-perfect" my alt-tabbing? For example when I'm running a Game like Warcraft 3, Battlefield, and I alt-tab to my desktop or browser it takes 5 seconds or so for it to "load".


 

airfoil

Golden Member
Jan 17, 2001
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Nope, it will not. The ALT Tabbing between full screen games and the desktop lags because Windows has to readjust the resolution and screen abruptly.
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
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Originally posted by: airfoil
Nope, it will not. The ALT Tabbing between full screen games and the desktop lags because Windows has to readjust the resolution and screen abruptly.

I think he's asking if it will eliminate the virtual memory thrashing you get when you task swap or exit an application that's using a lot of RAM -- generally the desktop and anything else you had open gets swapped out to disk and has to be brought back in, which slows things down quite a bit for a good 10-20 seconds (or longer).

Load up all your programs and then look at your "Peak Commit Charge" in Task Manager. If it's less than 1.5GB, then you shouldn't have anything swapping to disk when you ALT-TAB with 1.5GB of physical RAM.
 

henryay

Senior member
Aug 14, 2002
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I'm not sure but could it be the video card? Because my geforce 2 switches ALOT slower than most of the new cards I've seen. The ram size between my computer and the other computers are the same (512mb)
 

imported_Tick

Diamond Member
Feb 17, 2005
4,682
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Yes, more ram would help is this case, but only if that's actually the bottleneck. When you Alt-tab, do you hear a lot of hard drive accessing? Also, be aware that this might be a driver issue, so try updating.