XP and memory usage

[Montano]

Will WinXP use all the memory you throw at it, or is there a point where more memory is useless??

 

[Wolfsraider]

depends on what you do with xp

but 512 is definately the sweet spot as 256 mb does get used up pretty easily


edit lets say you add 1 gb of ram but only play games or cd's surf the web etc then yes the extra 512 mb is a waste as it will hardly ever be used

but if you edit video or work with photoshop then it will definately help

 

[elkinm]

The problem is that with more rame the system becomes hungries and tries to page more ram so in many cases withmy 512 MB of the system actualy runs slower then with 256 MB and I very often get the virtual memory is low error. This is with twice as much ram and pagefile and the same aplications. And windows is realy bad at giving up stolen memory as I have seen no real running programs with cache and pagefile usage in the hundreds of megabytes and programs running super slow in the page file instead of the ram. So my new unfortunate suggestion is get more ram only if you need it.