Increasing RAM

Hi. I know that this question is asked a lot by other users. I know that all of you say that, "if you upgrade from 3gb to 8gb, it would make no difference in speed if you don't use up that 3gb anyway, blah blah blah." But generally, I would really like to know if I go from 3gb ram to 8gb ram in windows 7 64bit, would I really not even notice a little tad bit of difference?

Thanks!

 

I didn't notice going from 4gb to 8gb. I did it for photoshop use and because it was easier to spend $15 than agonize over a decision.

 

Thumbs Up!

 

It is a question of what you do day to day. Windows 7 watches your usage patterns. The more RAM you have, the more it can prefetch to RAM. In other words, if you open say 10 different programs at 3 pm everyday, then if you have enough RAM, Windows 7 will start loading the necessary dlls and modules into memory before you actually open the program.

Personally, I saw a jump going from 4GB to 8GB because I use VMware heavily and I tend to have Outlook, Chrome, iTunes, several VNC sessions, several putty sessions, VmWare, matlab, Citrix connect, and a proprietary visualization suite all opened up.

 

Go to your task manager. Go to performance. Go to "resource manager" and see how much of your RAM is free. Have no free RAM? You'll likely benefit from an upgrade. Have a lot of free RAM? You likely won't.

It's about as simple as taht.

 

Yes and no. I went from the exact amounts that the OP used (3GB to 8GB) in my mom's Inspiron M5030, and while I will agree that you won't necessarily benefit from an upgrade if you have TECHNICALLY enough in the computer in most things such as gaming (although if you have SandyBridge HD3000 iGPU, and put in more (and faster) memory, it will improve fps by a fair bit), what it will afford is the ability to have more options. With 3GB RAM in my mom's computer, all I needed open to begin getting noticeable stuttering was LibreOffice, AIM, and 3 to 4 tabs of Firefox 8.0 (now 9.0.1), and even little things like the reminder that a DL had completed would lag. Also, with 8GB, providing you know your daily use, you can turn down (or off) the Paging File, which allows for less read / write to the HDD, and thus a small to medium boost in performance. It's the little things you CAN do when you have extra memory that make the boost noticeable.

Jason

 

I think that should be avoided on Windows 7. The page file on W7 is pretty dynamic depending on several factors, and even if you have an excess of RAM, it doesn't impact performance at all to just leave it there.

Mainly if you have a RAM heavy workload, yes you'll notice going from 3GB to 8GB. If you only do light stuff, then you probably won't notice.

On systems with less than 4GB of RAM and a user with a high memory usage workload, the page-file is what seriously impacts performance. But understand that the page-file is only really there as an overflow of sorts for when you run out of physical RAM. If you have excess RAM, the page-file is still there but it's not used very often at all.

 

@ oxyg3n520

I would say "yes", simply because your going from asynchronous dual channel with 3GB to synchronous dual channel with 8GB which could be noticed by the end user in almost all applications and games.

I cheaper solution would be to get just another 2GB stick and make your system 4GB synchronous dual channel instead off 8GB since you're saying you cannot make use of 8GB.

But personally I'd go for 8GB if you can afford it simply because it's more future proof, multitasking would be a slightly faster and the fact that ram is inexpensive ATM.