Can you have too much RAM?

Forgive me if this has been covered extensively here before...I didn't find any info on this by searching the forums.

I am getting ready to purchase additional RAM for my stock Acer. It shipped with 512 and I was thinking of just adding another 512, but then I saw a 1 gig chip for a really good price. The board will support 2 gig. Will I see performance increases (I don't game on the laptop but often have multiple programs running and with the 512 it sometimes slows down) all the way up to 2 gig, or will it be negligible if I have 1 gig versus 1.5 gig, or 1.5 gig versus 2 gig?

Also, how much of an effect does additional memory have on battery life. Is this a concern or really insignificant?

Thanks for the help.

 

Personally would go with the 1GB stick. If you want to upgrade in the future you won't have to throw out the old 512mb stick. When Windows runs out of memory, it has to use the hard drive for additional storage which is much slower than memory. If you are doing something like Photoshop or gaming, which use a lot of memory, the difference would be more pronounced than say surfing or burning discs. Good Luck.

 

Here's the simple answer. If you have the money, which most people should since ram is cheap nowadays, then NO you can never have too much ram. You can have more than enough, but that's not too much

1 gig is plenty, but with new games and programs hogging ram I'd say 2 gigs wouldn't hurt at all

Cheers,
Mike

 

The short answer is this: If you feel you need to upgrade past 512, which you may or may not, go ahead and get the 1 GB. You probably won't have to go past that 1.5 GB for 1.5+ years, if at all. At that point, you can get another GB and toss the original 512.

Howie

 

Alright...makes cents guys. Thanks for the info. BTW I ordered the 1 gig from ZipZoomFly for $80.

 

If you try to use very hugh image in illustrator (like 6 metre or more).. it's very very slow if you have ram 512mb or less... even you just only apply a layer style or effect.. it'll process about five minutes.. (Dothan 1.4M, 512MB)

However, if you use only office software, surf internet and listen mp3.. 512 mb of ram is ok.. BTW, if you use some software that swarm lots of memory like BitCo*** or Azeu***.. you need at least 1024 MB of ram for better performance

 

You can never have enough ram or hdd space

 

I agree with all above stated, but this thread title isn't so easy to answer. I really use my notebook hard. I usually have allocated more than 1 GB in windows. I game a lot. I overclock and measure speed, heat and so on. 2 GB is really great. My disk is almost silent all the time.

Now when I was buying my notebook I checked forums, tech sites and so on and found on many places benchmarks in games and windows (synthetic) that showed that actually 2GB ram is not at all faster than 1GB or less. Some benchmarks showed lower marks too. Even 2x512 is slower that 1x1GB if I remember right. So in case you don't use a larger part of your available ram, you might end up with a slower system. I actually removed one of my 1GB sticks and benchmarked in 3dmark05. I got between 50 and 100 marks more with CPU tests included. But what is the point of that when for example Far Cry on 512 makes you want to go and have a coffee break until it loads a level? Joke.

Now don't make big deal from it. Differences were not so big or spectacular, but simply exist. I don't argue the quantity of it, of course that 2GB offers faster work/gaming if you are using it, because there is no need to reach for the swapfile so often.

Just an observation.

Cheers,

 

There is an article in Tomshardware about how much memory is good enough. Other than some heavy games there is no performance advantage after 1 GB.

Infact there is not much advantage from 512MB to 1GB for typical Audio/Video processing, but it helps to have more ram during non-linear editing. But even then there is not much advantage after 1GB.

Unless you are into very heavy games( that too helps only for initial loading) or running several server softwares you do not need any thing more than 1 GB.

I currently run MySQL, JBoss, Eclipse, Weblogic server, sometimes Oracle with 1GB RAM, it never reached full 1GB. The biggest pig of all these being Weblogic running portal framework, but never had problems with 1GB.

Yes, my desktop has more (1.5GB), I just installed because I had it. Frankly I did not see any advantge at all.

 

Yes - I say stick with 1GB RAM unless you're going to be doing heavy gaming or having many programs open all at once. Most laptops support 2GB, but I don't really see an advatage in doing so, unless you really need the performance (You should see the Apple PowerMac G5 Quad - Up to 16GB RAM! Now that's insane, the RAM totals the cost of the actual computer!)