Little memory to more memory?

Question

I upgraded my memory from 256 to 1152mb and i really don't see any difference, my programs pop up the same speed the dvd burner is still the same speed. I have defragmented and deleted temp files etc. Any ideas or is this normal?

Answer 1

The RAM can't transfer information any faster than your CPU can process it.

Answer 2

If you had an older computer with quite a slow processor, I could see how this may not make a difference, because with 256MB of memory, you may have already had more than you needed.

If it is a newer computer, however, the amount of Ram you increased should have given you a noticeable boost in speed. It may be that your processor is overtaxed by antivirus, numerous items running in the system tray on the bottom right, etc.

If you click start, run, type msconfig, then go to the startup tab, you can remove any of the programs that you do not want running at startup. This will help your speed as well.

What is your CPU speed?
Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Different versions of Windows benefit in varying degrees from adding more RAM.

On Win 98 or even Win2000 you may not notice a real difference in performance.
Windows XP would show a significant increase in speed when going from 256MB to over 1GB of RAM.

How quickly your programs perform depends on the program. If it's minimum requirements were well under what you originally had you may not see a difference.

Use Windows Task Manager to see how much RAM is effectively being used by Windows & its resident programs.
This will tell you how much is being used & by which program.

DVD burning speed relies more on the drive & the CPU in your PC that the actual RAM.

Of course the software you use to burn DVDs will benefit but this still depends of which program you are using.
Nero 7, for example, can easily use almost 256MB of RAM when it is encoding an MPEG video file to DVD format.

regards,
Philip T

Answer 4

First make sure the system is reconizing the memory. Right click "my computer" and choose properties. If is is reconized, it's according to you're OS. If using Win95/98/ME there is really no difference in adding more memory. If win 2000/xp, there will be an increase in speed for loading programs, as the harddrive is used far less for memory. But once a program is loaded, there will be no difference in speed.

Answer 5

only way to really see a differance is to upgrade the whole system, memory will help if you have several programs running at one time and it will save your hard drive from having to do a lot of the work some of these things you will not notice

Answer 6

memory will not change the difference on making things come up! memory or what is known as RAM is for the amount of programs that can be opened!

it could be numerous things why your computer could be slow! could be a virus,applications running (kinda ruled that one out because you installed ram) also could be the computer itself! try housecall.trendmicro.com and scan for a virus!

other than them, you lost me!

Answer 7

Are you sure it was recognized by your computer?
Whats your CPU speed? This could be your bottleneck.
If you have, lets say a 300MHz CPU it wouldn't matter how much memory you have, you will never get a performance boost.

Answer 8

Did you add a memory card or replace your old one? If you added a card, the new one might not be the right one for your computer. That has happened to me once. I wish they were universal.

Answer 9

more memory only helps when you really need it, if you're doing simple programs it wont help much or you have your memory set to a lower speed

Answer 10

did you install the right ram?

if so, then check under my computer properties to see if the ram installed is correct. if not, return the ram.

if it is correct, then there should be a noticable increase in startup speed and program startup.