My Dell Dimension 8400 is going on 3 years old, has a dual x86 processor, and was quite fast when I bought it.
My question about the increased speed stems from computer-savvy fplks who’ve often remarked (in general) that just adding a whole bunch of RAM won’t help that much. I can’t provide a cite, because it’s something I’ve heard and read and mostly filed and forgot.
Anyway, my son induced me to go to the computer’s RAM max. Well, the 2Gig package arrived yesterday and awaits installation.
Will I notice a dramatic increase in velocity? Will the wind sweep my hair backward? Can my body tolerate the massive increase of G forces?
(I’ll be checking in for your inputs after Church.)
It depends in part on how much RAM you have now. It also depends on what you do with the computer. If you use a bunch of applications at the same time, or you keep tons of browser tabs open, then it can make a huge difference.
One things I’ve noticed is that RAM for older computers is actually more expensive per Gig than RAM for newer ones. It’s not always a good idea to buy a bunch of RAM for an old computer, when you could put that money towards a new one. I don’t know where a 3-year old computer fits into that though.
It depends on your computing “lifestyle”. You didn’t mention your operating system, and that has an effect, too. Most folks think that 2GB is just the minimum needed for Vista, but way more than that for XP.
You also didn’t say what you upgraded FROM. If you started with 128MB, it will be a dramatic improvement. From 1GB, not so much.
Do you run many programs simultaneously? Processes in the background? Heavy video processing? Is your startup group maxed out so you have a long row of tiny icons at the bottom of the screen? If so, the added RAM will probably make a noticable difference. Make your hair stand on end? Probably not, but it will decrease the disk churning, as less data & programs have to be paged in and out of virtual space.
If you are a one-program-at-a time person and mostly writing short letters in a word processor, the difference will be very little, although boot time will be shortened.
I don’t think 3 years is enough to make that much difference in price, in fact, assuming DDR2 it should be quite cheap for an upgrade.
So the main type of performance improvement you get with more RAM will be in multi-tasking, loading the OS, and opening RAM hungry apps.
Multi-tasking is when you’re listening to mp3’s, having a couple of browser windows open, and streaming video all at the same time. If it takes a while from the time you click one of your open applications and to the time it actually comes to the front and is avaliable to you (as the app is moved fromt he swap file on your hard drive to RAM), then more RAM will likely help. Also some applications are RAM hungry, including photo editors, video editors, and some games. More RAM will likely improve the snappiness of these apps as they won’t have to rely on the slow swapdisk file.
Of course, the actual performance improvement will vary depending on how much RAM you started with in the first place. I’m assuming 512 MB. I’ve ALWAYS seen noticible improvement going from 512 to 2 gigs in XP, YMMV.
I’d also take this time to defrag your drive and also to run msconfig and get rid of any startup programs you don’t need loading up at startup.
I am considering getting a new PC from a website, and am curious if I purchase it with 2 gigs, and then add another gig of RAM, if there will be any oddness from an “odd number” of RAM.
because the price difference on the website from 2 gig to 4 gig is pretty steep (though probably worth it, I guess. Depending.)
For general run of the mill types like me, more cooling and more RAM is never a waste.
Also, depends on what kind of internet connection you have. On dial up, a faster computer does not make as much difference in internet based things as it does when dealing with DSL or cable.
When you’re using your computer, does the hard drive run constantly? Is the hard drive light always lit?
In that case, the RAM will definitely improve performance. The hard drive is a sign of not having enough memory. When the computer is short of memory, it saves unused data on the hard drive and retrieves it when it needs it (while saving different unused data in its place). This leads to a constantly running hard drive and slow computer performance (all that reading and writing).
Extra memory allows processes to remain in memory, speeding up the computer.
And don’t worry – you can never have too much RAM.
I have a Dell Dimension 8300, pretty much the same computer as the OP. I recently upgraded from 1Gb to 2Gb of RAM.
I notice a difference when i’m running multiple apps at once, especially if i have large photoshop files open at the same time as running Dreamweaver, Word, Acrobat Pro and Firefox. If i’m just doing basic stuff like web browsing and email, my computer is no faster than it was before.
Actually, the upgrade was more expensive than i had hoped for, because my Dell motherboard takes 184-pin RAM, and virtually all the RAM produced nowdays in 240-pin.
I got 2 x 512Mb Corsair ValueSelect for about $50 at NewEgg. If i had a newer machine that accepts 240-pin memory, i could have gotten 2 x 1Gb for $10 less.
In my experience, and also based on a fair bit of online investigation, additional RAM doesn’t play a huge role in speeding up video processing. Sure, it helps a bit, but it’s really the power of the processor that is the key determining factor in video encoding.
One thing to note is that if you’re running 32-bit XP SP2 (which is likely), there’s a hard, internal limit on the amount of (userland) RAM that Windows will recognize that is less than the 4GB possible with 32 bits.
IIRC, just confirmed by this MS KB entry, it’s ~3.12GB. It’s due to memory mapping of devices; on a system with two video cards, for instance, you’ll actually get less then 3GB. (Recently, I had to figure this one out at work for a dual monitor user.)
However, you may be using up a valuable slot that could better be filled with a larger value. Upgrading later might force you to toss a card to free up that slot.
But if the computer is old, you probably won’t want to upgrade again anyway.
It depends on the motherboard. If it’s dual channel DDR2 RAM, then you need to install the DIMMs in pairs, or you will lose theoretical memory bandwidth (although I read an article, may have been on Tom’s Hardware, that said that the advantages of dual channel didn’t really translate into increased speed).
Having said that, since you’re not uncomfortable replacing your own RAM, in general it’s cheaper to buy the minimum amount of RAM you can with a given system (assuming you have a choice) and then upgrade it yourself.
For example, if the motherboard of your new machine comes with 4 DIMM slots, try to order the machine with only a single 1 GB DIMM (or 2x512, although that would limit yout to 3 GB unless you threw away the original DIMMs), you can then add three more.
I recently replaced the original 512M card in my HP notebook with a 1G card. This computer was never that fast to begin with, but I’ve noticed a tremendous improvement since the memory upgrade. It seems that somewhere between .5 and 1G is a breakpoint below which many of today’s applications and online resources overflow RAM and require a lot of disk I/O to function. Since I upgraded my memory, even my battery lasts much longer, which I think is due to the decrease in disk activity.
Beware though, if you try to run both the new memory card and the existing one you may run into problems, which the computer will announce by beeping at you and then failing to boot. I solved the problem (thanks to Doper help) by taking out the original .5G card, and putting the new card in the slot where the original memory card originally was.
As was mentioned previously, this is an operating system issue. XP’s “sweet spot” is about 1GB; above that, most people won’t see much of an improvement. Vista needs at least 2GB to be happy.