Would extra ram dramatically improve my pc's performance?

Question

I have a AMD xp 2600 with 120gb Hd and 512mb of ram and its sluggish, i've formatted, ran all the antivirus, spyware, defragged and cleaned it all out but its still the same and i have 2-300 mb of ram free when running but i've heard adding more ram will dramatically improve things, will this be so?

Answer 1

You say you've 2-300MB of RAM free, but this is with few programs running. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and look at the number of processes currently loaded - you'll see anywhere between 35 and 45, which is the norm. However, when you run a game or memory intensive application like a paint package or even bloated Instant Messengers like Yahoo! Messenger or Windows Live Messenger, that free memory pool will drop considerably.

Adding more RAM *will* make a difference generally because when the amount of free physical RAM in your machine drops below a critical level, your computer's swapfile - stored on the HD - will supply additional logical memory. Alas, a HD is considerably slower than physical memory.

Answer 2

Yes more ram will increase the performance of your PC. Basically your PC is going to utilize your ram first then once your ram is basically all in use the files start getting written to your hard drive which is called a swap file. Once this process begins your computer's performance is going to become very sluggish because your hard drive is working much harder, doing more process which slows down everything. Also when swap files are written to your HD this is where the majority of the fragmentation occurs.
I personally play a lot of video games and do graphic editing on my PC. I have 2g of ram installed and a back-up hard drive for storage. I did a neat little trick which increases performance and that is I have the swap files(virtual memory) written to a 3 gig partition on my back up drive - Allowing my main HD to run smooth, not become as fragmented and allocated a specific partition on my back up for these files. Depending on what you use your computer for I'd recommend 1.5 to 2g of ram if your PC is used for gaming. 1-1.5g for applications based PC. If you have another HD installed go to Start/control panel/system/advanced - performance settings/advanced - virtual memory change/ C:/ no paging file - (back up drive) custom size and set it from 1 to max of 3000. You will see a huge increase in performance

Answer 3

More RAM in the pc you've described the specs of will probably speed things up for you. However don't spend too much imo.

I got my last pc 3.2 HT P4 with top video card, windows xp pro, and 2 GB of EU rated Ram for £370 delivered.... which makes more sense than spending £50 on blocks of Ram upgrade for your old pc in my opinion.

Answer 4

512 ram is enough for PC if u dont play heavy games. generaly performance can dramaticly improve when changing ram from 128 or 256 to 512 but 512 is enough for current OS. i had 512+256=768 mb ram but once a day 256mb get damaged and I removed. now I have 512mb and i didnt notice any downfall in performance in comparison to 768mb.
I guess u have few norton product installed on ur PC which r famous to reduce PC performance.

Answer 5

upgrading the ram amount will help. I was running an Intel Pentium MMX 233 Mhz, 196 Megs ram, 4.32 gig hardrive 2.0 meg vidio card, hardware. I was running Windows XP home Edition SP2 embedded, zonalarm firewall, the windows firewall, avg anti-virus, spybot search and destroy, internet explorer, firefox bowser, msn messenger, windows washer all at once before my motherbourd had a "meltdown" (blew a capacitor) at it fried haven't yet bought a new system.

Answer 6

I too have the amd 2600+ with 512 mb ram and just added 1gb ram and things run much smoother.
go for it

Answer 7

More RAM will give a wider bandwidth for internal data transfer and computing, but CPU speed is also important. With 512MB of RAM, if you upgrade to 1GB, you will feel the different. But donnot overdo it, anything more than 1GB is just a waste.

Answer 8

Could well do, can't do any harm. Take your machine online to www.crucial.com for a (free) rundown of your specific system and recommendations as to RAM. You don't have to buy your RAM from them, tho' they hope you will!

Hope this helps

Answer 9

I've heard that it will. I'd like to find some ram for my computers too.

Answer 10

It relies upon on your utilization development. If the courses you utilize do no longer require lots memory, 480 MB may well be lots. different courses could require greater. many times, i might in simple terms watch for the perplexing disk gentle (there could be somewhat LED gentle that flashes for all perplexing disk accesses) and/or hear for the perplexing disk (it truly is many times in simple terms truly loud adequate to hearken to). If the device is making an attempt to get right of entry to the perplexing disk lots devoid of me attempting to save or study records then which will make the gadget sluggish to change between courses and is a robust indicator that I could get greater RAM for that device. (Or, that I truly have a buggy software with memory leaks and probably I in simple terms could desire to restart it or maybe reboot...)