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PC Memory overkill?

Cutter John

Cutter John

Rear Admiral
Rear Admiral
I just did a major upgrade to my system. Asus M2N motherboard, 5600+ Athlon dual core w/ all SATA drives.

I currently have 2 GB's of memory in the thing. Was wondering if adding another Gig would actually accomplish anything?

Currently running Win2000 Pro, and use my system mainly for web browsing and Second Life, plus the ocassional Photoshop work, a little gaming, and watching video clips and DVD's.
 
2 gigs is good, you would only really see the difference in heavy video work and such. Though you may notice it in photoshop.
 
For what you are doing it doesn't sound like adding more will benefit you in any way.
 
Zero Hour said:
Are you using a 64-bit Windows? If not, stick with the 2GiB.
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64Bit support didn't arrive until XP came out and the OP is running 2000Pro.

1Gb was considered the sweet spot for XP, 2GB for Vista but not sure about 2000.

Then again these days with memory so cheap it's pretty easy to put oodles in the PC but it will always come down to what you're gonna be doing.
 
Until you upgrade to Vista, 2GB is definitely enough. I have seen some new machines with Vista that come with 3GB, but it's rare that you would need that much for what you're doing.
 
No point doing that with Windows 2000 - it can't fully address any more than 3GB (and even that's excessive unless you're running a server). You may as well keep your cash in the bank and stick with 2GB

GM
 
Alaedhros said:
Until you upgrade to Vista, 2GB is definitely enough. I have seen some new machines with Vista that come with 3GB, but it's rare that you would need that much for what you're doing.
Click to expand...

Yet Vista can run quite fine in 1Gb - I'm running at the moment on two machines with 1GB - An Athlon X2 3800 and Pentium D 805 and don't notice any real speed difference between XP and Vista on the machines.

Though if I was running say Photoshop then might notice it.
 
^ Right; I didn't mean to say that Vista requires two or three, and I apologise if I came across thus. As you said, I think the only reason Vista would need more than 2GB is if you're doing a lot of Photoshop editing or movie editing or something like that.
 
Mr. B said:
Today's overkill is tomorrow's inadequacy.
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Maybe, but I've noticed that RAM is getting to be more and more overkill each year. By that, I mean it is getting relatively cheaper to get the standard RAM amount each year.
 
TheBrew said:
Mr. B said:
Today's overkill is tomorrow's inadequacy.
Click to expand...

Maybe, but I've noticed that RAM is getting to be more and more overkill each year. By that, I mean it is getting relatively cheaper to get the standard RAM amount each year.
Click to expand...

Given the way that memory requirements are going it's probably a good thing.

As a study of OS/2's history shows a hike in the memory requirement of a program at a time when RAM prices have just gone ballistic can have devastating consequences (specially when you need 16MB when 640K wasn't quite the norm).

Though I guess these days the prices is such that the market could generally absorb it without much of a hiccup.
 
The Dell 690 system where I work is total overkill. Each desktop can handle between 32 or 64 gb,depending on power supply type.
 
Thanks for the advice guys. I'll just hold at 2 gigs for now. At $50 per Gig though I can certainly upgrade if I ever feel the need.

As for my OS, I've honestly been debating this for a couple of months now. Been running Win2K for a few years and its always been nice and stable. So far the only sign of coming obsolescence is that the current version of Quicktime won't run under 2000, so I haven't been able to watch some recent online movie trailers. No biggie sure, but a sign of things to come.

So I've been contempating XP or Vista. I've only seen XP for sale in a few places, and it strikes me as kinda stupid that MS has never dropped the price on the damn thing. I'm still not sure about Vista though. I'd like to wait a bit longer for MS to shake out all the bugs before I make the leap.

Still, I'm not sure if I've really been sold on the need to upgrade my OS just yet. 2K does everything I need it to quite efficiently. I'm just not seeing the need to spend $100-200 on a new OS that does exactly the same thing I'm doing now, only with prettier backgrounds.
 
Cutter John said:
Thanks for the advice guys. I'll just hold at 2 gigs for now. At $50 per Gig though I can certainly upgrade if I ever feel the need.

As for my OS, I've honestly been debating this for a couple of months now. Been running Win2K for a few years and its always been nice and stable. So far the only sign of coming obsolescence is that the current version of Quicktime won't run under 2000, so I haven't been able to watch some recent online movie trailers. No biggie sure, but a sign of things to come.

So I've been contempating XP or Vista. I've only seen XP for sale in a few places, and it strikes me as kinda stupid that MS has never dropped the price on the damn thing. I'm still not sure about Vista though. I'd like to wait a bit longer for MS to shake out all the bugs before I make the leap.

Still, I'm not sure if I've really been sold on the need to upgrade my OS just yet. 2K does everything I need it to quite efficiently. I'm just not seeing the need to spend $100-200 on a new OS that does exactly the same thing I'm doing now, only with prettier backgrounds.
Click to expand...

I'd go WinXP(Pro) before I'd go Vista (and I've been working with Computers starting with mainframes in 1978 - and have been around since the PC era started).

MS Vista should soon have a different name - Millenium Edition II ;)
 
Cutter John said:
Thanks for the advice guys. I'll just hold at 2 gigs for now. At $50 per Gig though I can certainly upgrade if I ever feel the need.

As for my OS, I've honestly been debating this for a couple of months now. Been running Win2K for a few years and its always been nice and stable. So far the only sign of coming obsolescence is that the current version of Quicktime won't run under 2000, so I haven't been able to watch some recent online movie trailers. No biggie sure, but a sign of things to come.

So I've been contempating XP or Vista. I've only seen XP for sale in a few places, and it strikes me as kinda stupid that MS has never dropped the price on the damn thing. I'm still not sure about Vista though. I'd like to wait a bit longer for MS to shake out all the bugs before I make the leap.

Still, I'm not sure if I've really been sold on the need to upgrade my OS just yet. 2K does everything I need it to quite efficiently. I'm just not seeing the need to spend $100-200 on a new OS that does exactly the same thing I'm doing now, only with prettier backgrounds.
Click to expand...

Or install virtual PC on your 2K box and play your quicktime movies inside of a virtual XP session, heh heh.
 
Mr. B said:
Today's overkill is tomorrow's inadequacy.
Click to expand...
Yes, except for the fact that by the time 2GB is inadequate, the rest of the system will be inadquate.

For example, my first computer was a 75Mhz Pentium with 16MB of RAM. I could have spent around $500 for a full 64MB. However, by the time that much memory became necessary, the proc speed would be a bottleneck.
 
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