do I have enough RAM?

D

dmehling

Member
I'm running Windows XP with 2 GB of RAM with a pretty fast dual core processor and I do a moderate amount of multitasking. I seem to be getting adequate performance, but I'm still not sure if I have enough memory. I try to look at the information in the task manager but it is confusing with terms like physical memory, commit charge, and kernel memory. My page file usage is about 1.2 GB. I would appreciate any suggestions.
 
2GB is probably lots. A big pagefile doesn't necessarily mean you are running out of RAM either if stuff's being constantly paged in/out then more RAM would help. XP has monitoring tools from MMC that you can monitor it with.
 
xp 32 bit will handle 3.2gb of ram. so if you can put in another 1gb that would be good. But I have not seen any program that really went over 1.7gb of ram of than video and photo editing.
 
XP runs quite well with 512MB of memory. Only very powerful programs would need more. 2 GB is more than you will likely ever use. Memory is cheap and, if it makes you feel better, you can add more assuming you have a pair of unused DIMM slots. I doubt you would notice any difference in performance.

I normally put 2 GB in XP machines, not because I think the user needs it but because it is cheap and it gives the users comfort. My own XP machines have only 1GB.
 
I think fmw is correct I've never seen a XP computer use more then 1 Gig of memory unless it was doing video editing or running some other software like a CAD program. The extra memeory also comes in handy if your running virtual machines.
 
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