putting more ram = more performance?

hi, just a quick question. i have toshiba satellite with 2 gigs of ram running in vista and i was just curious if i put anohter 1-2 gigs of ram in here, would i get any good performance increase?

 

Not really. With 3 it would help a bit, but vista 32bit cant recognize 4 gigs, so it would be pointless.

 

ah, thats what i heard, thanks for the heads up

 

As said, the max on 32 bit is 3GB of ram, if your running Vista 64bit then you can use the full 4GB, but it's not neccisary if you dont do serious multitasking.

Gaming most likely will not benefit from any more than 2GB unless your running alot of background programs.

 

it will be a waste of money

 

2-->3gb can be worth it. Depending on what you do. Some games demand alot of memory space in addition turbo cache or other similar technology shares your system ram with your video card to increase game performance.

Since ram is about one of the cheapest things you can get for your computer and you can never really have too much I would upgrade if I found it appropriate.

 

Vista can certainly recognize more than 3GB of RAM. The "limit" usually occurs around 3.5'ish GB.

But to answer the question, more RAM only improves performance in one situation. When you run out of memory, and Windows is forced to use the pagefile. That can be avoided with more RAM. But if it doesn't happen much in the first place, there's nothing to be gained by installing more RAM.

 

since vista 32 bit can only notice 3 is it worth maxing out my ram to 4 gigs with windows xp?

 

Actually, it's a limitation with any 32 bit OS. Even XP has the 3GB limit unless your using a 64 bit OS which has a theoretical max ram limit of 1PB I believe..