How Come My Computer didnt get faster when i added RAM?

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DavidWright05

New Member
I am running an old like 6 year old computer with an AMD 1.4 CPU and it had 256 RAM...

I am getting or building a new computer soon but I figured until then i'll add more RAM (a few months ago). So I purchased a matching 256Mb stick that was the right type and everything...

My friends say "Oh you'll notice a big if not huge difference once you add it in", but I have not noticed anything better. If anything my computer has just gotten slightly slower since then...

I ran a bunch of diagnostics and they all recognize the new memory stick and say its functioning fine, what could be wrong?
 
Adding RAM doesn't speed your computer up one bit. It just gives your computer more...um...workspace.

The ONLY time you'll notice a huge difference is if you're running say 64M RAM and it's using the harddrive(IE swap file) for the RAM you're lacking.
 
DavidWright05 said:
I am running an old like 6 year old computer with an AMD 1.4 CPU and it had 256 RAM...

I am getting or building a new computer soon but I figured until then i'll add more RAM (a few months ago). So I purchased a matching 256Mb stick that was the right type and everything...

My friends say "Oh you'll notice a big if not huge difference once you add it in", but I have not noticed anything better. If anything my computer has just gotten slightly slower since then...

I ran a bunch of diagnostics and they all recognize the new memory stick and say its functioning fine, what could be wrong?
Click to expand...
With ram, its not the more ram, the faster your computer goes. When your computer uses all the ram, it turns to virtual ram. Virtual ram is when your computer uses a part of your hard drive and uses it as ram. Virtual ram is a lot slower then ram. If your computer has never needed to use virtual ram, then you won't see a difference in speed. The extra ram is just there so your computer can store more data on the ram before it has to turn to virtual memory.
 
Could be your hard drive

What is the size of your hard drive and how much hard drive space do you have left?

What type of Operating System are you running?
 
LHP said:
What is the size of your hard drive and how much hard drive space do you have left?

What type of Operating System are you running?
Click to expand...


110 Gig, partitioned into 90/20. I have about 5 Gig left on my big drive where i put apps and data, and 5 gig left on the smaller partition where i have windows

Win XP
 
guys when I run cubase a lot of times I will get the popup saying "windows memory is too low, now increasing the page file" or whatever, in the system tray...

Also lately my ****ing computer has taken to just suddenly rebooting occasionally... I dont mean shutting down and restarting, just totally going blank and then booting back up.
 
DavidWright05 said:
guys when I run cubase a lot of times I will get the popup saying "windows memory is too low, now increasing the page file" or whatever, in the system tray...

Also lately my ****ing computer has taken to just suddenly rebooting occasionally... I dont mean shutting down and restarting, just totally going blank and then booting back up.
Click to expand...

Yuep, that would be virtual memory for you. As for the restarts, it could be a lot of things. Have you ever checked for spyware/viruses etc.?
 
Partitioned or not, if you use the main harddrive, it's going to slow down your performace. If you want to gain any performace without adding RAM, use another drive for the swap file. That way they can work independently rather than the primary drive working double time...
 
RAM will speed up performance to an extent. Say your running XP with 128MB of RAM. Since you only have 128, alot of programs will be running off of the swap file, which runs much slower. Adding more RAM will lower the number of files that are on the swap file, and in turn increase performance.
 
well, i would format and reinstall windows XP. then i think you would see and big difference in speed. and its al wys goog to reinstall xp once in a while so your pc stays stable.:)
 
David, what these gents are saying is that if you add a second hard drive, and put your swap file (= virtual memory Windows uses when your RAM is full up) on that second hard drive instead of the main one where Windows and all your programs are, you will notice faster overall computer performance. I did this myself and I can tell you that they're correct. I can also tell you that when I added more RAM to my PC that everything ran a bit faster, and there was less hard drive use.
You can also fix the size of your swap file to something like 2x the size of your RAM. Then Windows won't have to keep calculating a new size. I have 1GB of RAM, so I fixed my swapfile size to 2GB on my slave drive. MUCH faster than a "normal" installation.
Tom
 
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What I was saying, if you try to do more than one thing on the main harddrive at once, it's going to slow it down. When you have a limited amount of memory, one of the main reasons it goes so slow(but actually works) is because it uses part of the harddrive as RAM, while the other part is grinding away, loading your software. Someone suggested using a partition, but you are still using the same drive, thus slowing it down. I was simply stating that and how another drive would improve performace over using a single drive with a swap file.

Back to what you said, if you have over 1G of RAM(512M will work if you don't run much) you can disable the swap file and that helps with some performace. You won't gain raw performace, but things will load faster.
 
You can't disable the swap file. Never do that. Windows was designed to make use of it no matter how much RAM you have. If you disable it you will be prone to getting errors.

The accepted recommendation is to put your swap file (pagefile.sys) on your fastest harddrive.

The more RAM you have, the less it is going to have to dump to the drive to load something else. It will still dump to the drive no matter how much RAM you have, because it only allocates RAM to the active part of the application (and this is why you will get errors if you try to disable the swap file), but multitasking should be a lot smoother with the extra 256, and you will also be able to load more of the kernel into RAM which should increase performance to some degree.
 
I've got the swap disabled on my laptop(yes, with only 512M) and my desktop. I'd had some minor problems with my laptop in the past, but thus far, I've yet to have a single problem with my desktop.
 
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