how good is 4GB of RAM?

when i look at the options to customize notebooks alot of them have the option of 4GB of memory. how much faster doe sthis make my PC

 

What's your OS? 32bit OS wont take benefit of 4Gig RAM. To maximize your RAM, you have to use Windows XP Pro 64bit or Vista Ultimate 64bit.
4GB RAM will help alot for video encoding task, 3D animation and rendering.

 

Speeding up your OS with ram tops out at around 2-2.5GB's.
For games, video and photo editing, 3D animation, 4GB could really improve that.

 

im looking to get 64-bit vista ultimate so the 4GB of ram would really help?

 

Do it if you have more money then brains but if your not rich dont bother, spend it on more importent stuff, you can always upgrade it later when ram is cheaper but its much harder and epesive to ugrade your processsor. Spend it on vidio card if you game alot.

 

Well, it depends on what you intend on doing with your laptop mostly...We can't tell you how much of a performance upgrade you'll get with 4gb, unless we know this...

eg. 4gb wont help with word processing

 

I plan on doing some moderate gaming along with school use. So you think I should get 2GB of Ram and then buy another 2 Gigs later when its cheap?

 

NewEgg.com is selling 2GB sodimm's for under $40, which is pretty darn cheap. As for whether or not one needs 4GB, I would say you'll be fine with 2GB. If you're using a 32-bit OS, then 3GB is the maximum that will be put to use. I used Vista-Biz 64-bit with 2GB for about two weeks, and it was decent, added a second 2GB chip, and it was a little bit better. Switched to XP (32-bit), and it was WAAAAAY better. ;-)

 

At current RAM prices, why not buy it. It's not going to get a lot cheaper - RAM standards change all the time so the future cheapest RAM will likely not fit in your laptop anymore because it will be using some different standard. Just look at current RAM prices for 3 or 4 year old laptops - way more expensive than for new machines.

If you are using XP, don't bother - XP does not even take full advantage of 2GB so I would not think the 64 bit version could do a lot with 4. Not because it can't address it, it's more because it simply wasn't optimized for that much RAM, and frankly the disk cache logic in XP sucks.

If you are using Vista or OS X, definitely go for 4GB. I imagine Vista being a lot smarter about what to do with lots of RAM, sort of like OS X. That will be even more true in the future when they have ironed out all the bugs that currently plague this OS.

I have 4GB on Mac OS X and it definitely makes a difference. I routinely run several heavyweight programs simultaneously and nothing can faze it. Keep in mind that if the OS is halfway decent, then all the RAM that you are not using gets used as disk cache. More disk cache == better performance.

 

3GB is my lucky number. I initially intended to go to vista ultimate 64bit with 4GB ram on my S1, then I decided to stick to XP Pro for a while longer. So I swapped the rams from my 2GB X60s, to have 3GB in each machine. Same brand, same speed.

And that's why I'm still a newbie. Dual channel, dual shmannel

 

Huh?
Windows XP doesn't need, or use, more than 2GB, no. But individual applications can still use it. If you run applications that need a lot of memory, then it will certainly make a difference under XP.