Just got one of those new dual core XP Media Edition PCs and I really love it.
It came with 2GB of memory and has slots for another 2GB. The computer geek in me says “you can never have too much memory,” so I feel the urge to plop in the second 2GB.
Now for the practical question: What can I do with 4GB of memory?
Is there some way to encourage Windows to load the entire OS into memory? Is it already doing all that behind the scenes?
Any other tricks I can do to make use of that memory?
For now, I’m still just using the machine as an expensive Tivo box, but I plan on doing both video editing as well as photo editing on it soon (Photoshop really likes that breathing room!)
Photoshop and video editing will take care of using up that 4 gig for ya, so I wouldn’t worry about it. Video editing, especially, will probably use all the memory you’ve got and ask for more.
Windows (and any other decent virtual memory implementation) will take advantage of extra memory automatically; you can tune it a little bit, but you’re not going to get huge payoffs.
If it doesn’t run out of memory, it likely wouldn’t need to page, anyway, so turning off the file wouldn’t be likely to make it faster.
It might make it slower, though: everything starts out on disk. With VM (paging) on, portions of Windows will be memory-mapped (left on disk until used). If they’re never used, and large chunks won’t be, you won’t pay the penalty for loading them at all. Turn off paging, and everything has to be read off disk into memory. (This is oversimplified, but let’s run with it).
It’s unlikely that in the general case you could make the system noticably faster by turning off VM, and you might slow it down (or worst case – make it crash). There are specific counter-examples, but I’m assuming you want a scenario you can set up and forget, for day-to-day use.
Tons. I’m not sure what the OS takes up but it’s below 200 megs.
No. You’ll generally get an “out of memory” error and whatever you’re trying to run won’t load, but windows won’t crash.
Windows is designed to page some components of the OS out even if there’s enough memory to keep them loaded, so you do gain a benefit to shutting off the page file.
If it’s a Viiv machine you can go to http://winterolympics.entriq.net and download full screen video highlights of the Olympics for free. This has nothing to do with memory, but I am tangentially involved with creating that site and want people to use it.
I’m actually considering another couple gigs myself – I have two already, but four would really give a ton of elbow room.
For me, it’s a matter of what I have running all the time on top of the apps that I use regularly.
For startup apps I have quite a few – WindowBlinds, ObjectDock, SpamPal with Bayesian plugin, Yahoo! Widget Engine (Konfabulator), Rainmeter, Norton Antivirus, nVidia Firewall, and a bunch of other usual startup apps (volume control, device monitors, etc). A fresh, idle boot reveals I use about 350 megs of RAM sitting still. Under normal browsing conditions wherein I may have more than one browser window/tab open at a time I can suck up as much as 750 megs or more.
Now, I also use pretty memory-intensive apps: Photoshop, Sound Forge, Vegas, and Fruity Loops, to name a few. Two gigs is pretty comfortable, but especially when working on large images in Photoshop, large sound files in Sound Forge, movies in Vegas or songs using a lot of samples in Fruity, I can definitely hit that limit, so four gigs would give me just about enough to never have to worry about memory or degraded performance from hitting the swap file.
To say “you can never have enough memory” is a fair assessment if you routinely engage in activities that consume the stuff in great quantities.
If you don’t however, more memory likely won’t make any appreciable difference.
I’ve only (only?) got 1 gig of Ram and Google Earth isn’t a problem (even full screen). I always have Media Center open, a browser window or three, a few apps and IM. Still snappy.
I could upgrade to 4Gig. also, but I haven’t seen the need yet.
Question;
Will more Ram necessarily make video editing faster?, or is that mostly a function of the software and the processor? I use Pinnacle 9 for editing and it takes forever to render stuff, would more Ram help?
That’s purely bound to the processor. More RAM will let it fit more in to render at once, but the amount of time that saves you on disk access is negligible. The only thing that will speed up video rendering is a faster CPU.
I don’t believe that Windows XP will use more than 2 GB. Certain server editions will, though. And Windows XP-64 will. Just this past week I read an article about how the move to 64 bit and the consequently available extra memory made a real difference to 3D modellers - the modellers modelled spaceships etc in scifi programs. It cut rendering times down from an hour to 15 minutes IIRC. I think the article was on Slashdot, but I’m not sure.
