2 gig of ram worth it?

I have a 4501 WLMI (Pentium M 1.5 1mb cache) and am trying to maximize it's performance. I have gone from:

2x256mb pc2700 to 2x 512mb pc3200
and
40gig, 2mb cache HDD to 60gig 5400rpm 2mb cache drive.

What I was wondering is if I upgraded my ram to 2 gigs (2x 1gig sticks) would I really see any performance boost? Is there a point when you are upgrading with no performance increase? and if so where is that line?

Thanks!

 

Well it all depends on what you are doing on the computer. Are you word-processing or gaming. If you are gaming, what games are you playing?

 

512 on my acer is fine for surfing wordprocessing light gaming. (old games). 2gig would be nice but i doubt i'll use it on my notebook.

 

Well if you have at least 2gigs you can disable swap file so it wouls boost performance not only in games, especially that notebook's hard drivers (even the fastest ones) are slow compared to desktop ones, so no swap file on a lappy means more than on home desktop.

I got 1GB in one stick juzt in case i had to much money to spend on another GB one day

 

I play BF2 a little and mostly just internet stuff and word processing.

Where can you disable your swap file?

 

I wouldn't recommend disabling the swap file. And I have 2 GB RAM.
In 3dmark05 I see a small decrease in performance. But games are more fluent and don't stutter. here I talk about new games like FEAR.

2 GB come in handy when I do my work and allocate a lot of RAM in Windows. That is actually the best usage so far.

For more info check this:
http://www.thegamebooks.com/how-do-2-gb-ram-improve-the-system?-t61.html

Cheers,

 

Well if you want BF2 to be smoother you can upgrade. You won't see much of an increase in performance on word processing and websurfing though.

 

Thanks, that site is pretty cool. What I don't understand is how 2gb could actually hurt performance in some cases. Can anyone explain this?

 

I guess it is due to the refreshing, timings etc. Actually number of sticks also has the impact on performance. 1x1GB shows better results than 2x512.

But if you need more than 1 gig and you have only two slots I guess the best thing is to have 2x1GB and that is it. You reached the limit of 2GB, so at least you don't bother anymore with ram upgrading .

Cheers,

 

You'd get the most performance boost out of a faster hard drive.

2GB is definitely worth it if you are a gamer. I had 1GB originally, but then I went to 2GB - much smoother (in some games that utilize that much memory, such as Quake4.)

 

I just upgraded my HDD because the stock HDD was 2mb buffer, and I went to a 16mb buffer. I think it might have been better to goto a 7200 RPM 8mb buffer though =(.

A question on that. When I run HD tune with my new HDD, it says my buffer size is 0kb. Is there another good HDD program that is more accurate?

 

Could try Everest Home Edition, not sure if that is avaliable anymore though . . you can always google the serial number of the drive.

Yeah, if you really wanted a performance boost, you should have gone with the 7200RPM drive. The 60GB 7200RPM Hitachi is very reasonably priced now, might look into that. You can then stick your current drive into an external enclosure and use it for storage purposes.

 

You might try defragementing your HD, offline, so swap file and hiberfil.sys are also defragmented. I tested it and you can gain around 15 sec in Windows load time, and everything works better (subjective feeling). But again, a fast disk will make a difference if you need it (movie editing, music editing etc...). Otherwise I think it is much better to have a lot of RAM first and then upgrade disk. Especially on notebooks.

Cheers,