NC10 - Uprgrade to 2GIG - Worth it ?

Just picked up a black NC10 as a present. Installed MSOffice, removed useless utilities, downloaded all updates, and I'm impressed. It will only be used for browsing the internet, small usage of word/excel, and photo browsing. I'd appreciate some honest feedback regarding the 2GB upgrade. I know 2G sticks are available for £20 all day long, and the money isn't an issue, but, for a machine used for these purposes only, what's the general concensus, is the upgrade to 2G really going to make any difference ? - I'm sure many people upgraded before they even switched theirs on for the first time, or not long after, and will post replies of strong reccomendation, but I'd appreciate some factual evidence.

If it was a gaming machine, I wouldn't even think twice about any upgrades, but do wonder if it'll make any difference whatsoever on a more than capable machine used for these tasks.

Thanks.

Ic.

 

There's a very easy way to test it. Open up a couple of applications that you might be using at the same time. Then open up some more applications, documents and pictures.

Press ctrl-alt-del and see how much memory you are actually using.

I personally NEVER go over 1GB, not even close. In my case it's completly pointless. Even when I open up 40 applications I'm not using 1GB.

Ofcourse if you're planning to install Vista it's a different story. In that case 2GB is necessary.

 

I agree with phil that most people dont need over 1GB, the only people that really do are power users who try to push the machine to do something it wasnt originally designed for, or people who just like upgrading.

 

Thanks for your honest opinions. The truth is that if it was for me, I'd do the 2G upgrade anyway, as I have a phobia of slow PC's, but after tweaking it, it really is as fast for general browsing/office as my ASUS G1S, and for this reason, for my wife, I question the neccesity of the upgrade, despite the small, almost insignificant cost implication.

 

It's never going to happen !

 

Exactly.

Some people need more though, like Erokitsune said, for things like Photoshop for example.

Here's an example to show what you can do with 900MB memory.

 

Again, thanks for the replies. I forgot to mention something though....

We do have a family video camera (Panasonic SD5). It produces 1080i (1920 x 1080 50Hz i) AVCHD. I can play these videos under WMP on my G1S, and also on my custom desktop without a problem. I tried on the NC10, and I didn't expect it to run them. It did, but very jerky. My natural assumption is that this is purely down to the processor, but I can't help wondering if the extra 1G would make the difference here, because if it did, I'd upgrade just for this.

 

Have you set your NC10 to maximum performance? (click on the battery manager in the system tray)

If so there's only one way to find out. Run the video and press ctrl-alt-del and go to the last tab Performance and check the actual memory in use.

 

I honestly didn't check the performance settings. I had it connected to the mains power supply, and assumed that this would give max performance. When she's gone to bed later, I'll sneak it out of its' hiding place, and have another look !

 

Default setting is not maximum performance so that will help.

Also try VLC instead of WMP.

PS. I just played a 720p mkv but it hardly takes any memory, so I doubt a memory upgrade will accelerate video playback.

 

Yeah, I tried VLC a few times on my G1s, but didn't appreciate any noticeable improvement over WMP.

Interesting. Then I'll definitely be taking a look.

 

VLC uses less system resources than WMP, so it's a good choice for a netbook.

Mediaplayer Classis is another good player, it comes in the K-Lite codec pack.

 

Yeah, I installed the K-Lite codec pack, as I have done on all my machines, but I still spec WMP as default player as it's a bit more user friendly for the average user.

 

i recommend MPC but i like some of the features in VLC such as setting the video as my wallpaper

 

I use VLC and it barely uses any memory..its a great stripped down program.

(PS it also plays video formats that other programs need codecs for) and I have had sound issues with other programs where movies I find on the internet wont play sound unless I play it with VLC.

I ordered mine last week...its only coming with 1GB though...

So are you guys saying that if I am using the internet and have Excel open at the same time its not going to be a problem?

I have thought about possibly putting Dreamweaver and Photoshop on there also, do you think I would then need to upgrade?

 

Web browsing and Excel won't use too much RAM. Photoshop might welcome more RAM if you have several images open at the same time.

John

 

would you really use photoshop that often without an external monitor with the nc10? that resolution is tiny for photoediting

 

just for when i am traveling and I dont have my desktop with me and I need to crop an image...

 

Check your memory use with ctrl-alt -del. You may not need 2GB at all.

Upgrading to 2GB doubles your hibernate time and uses a bit more power.

 

Why does upgrading to 2GB of RAM double the time required for hibernating?

 

Hibernating writes the content of the memory to hard disk before shutting off.

 

I would add "may" in front of doubles.

The time won't be automatically doubled since the RAM has to be in use. If you have more RAM then the XP will have more RAM space. Vista will automatically use all the spare RAM as a cache and that always add to the hibernation time.

John

 

I'm planning on using photoshop and dreamweaver, so the extra gig might give me some spunk.

 

Really? Let's say XP with 1GB, the hibernation file is 1GB, whether it's in use or not. XP with 2GB the hibernation file will be 2GB whether it's in use or not.

Not correct?

I would personally check that with ctrl-alt-del instead of making assumptions.

 

The file is 2GB, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the whole of the file gets read and written. It wouldn't be a big programming challenge to write the length currently in use as the first data in the file.

I have observed on numerous occasions that the more applications I have open then the longer hibernation takes (this is on my main computer with 3GB RAM). Try a clean start and see how long that takes to hibernate. Then open up applications until all the RAM is in use and check the hibernation time again.

John

 

With 320MB memory in use hibernate takes 14.4 seconds from pressing the button to completely off.

With 160MB memory in use it takes 13 seconds.

Now I'd like to try it with 2GB. Maybe some else can do that (needs to be Hitachi 160GB hard drive though).

 

I have 2GB and with 322MB of memory used it took 14.7 seconds to completely hibernate.

With 174MB of memory in use it took 10 seconds to completely hibernate.

With 434MB of memory in use it took 18.9 seconds.

The difference between the first and last test was that the first test consisted mainly of firefox, ie, pinball, and an mp3 and the last test had 5 instances of VLC running, playing the same dvd iso from the second partition.


And just for comparison I ran 7 instances of VLC playing the same dvd iso (418MB in use) and it took my desktop 29 seconds to fully go into hibernation.
My desktop is a:
Core 2 quad q6700
with 2GB of ram
120GB 7200rpm drive

The NC10 was using about 87% of the cpu while my desktop was using about 10% of the cpu

 

What hard drive do you have?

I think to make accurate measurements we should repeat the test at least 3 times because indivual runs can have differences.

 

While these test are useful there are other factors that can affect the results. Two identical hard drives in different machines may be full or empty and can have different levels of fragmentation which will affect the HD performance.

There are probably other factors too.

 

My drive is the stock 160GB drive and has very little on it (one program and one iso file).

 

I just tried:
360MB -> 22s
680MB -> 32s
880MB -> 44s

Times measured from giving the command.

This suggests there is a fixed overhead of about 5s plus around 20-25MB/s for RAM used.

John

 

Won't your memory consumption never go above 900MB (of 1 GB) since XP will automatically increase your page file to compensate (such that the OS will always have some leeway of space)

 

Stock drive can be Hitachi or Fujtisu and possibly others. Which one is yours? (you can see in device manager)
Mine is Hitachi.

Depends on your settings. When I tested the memory consumption I could still see the increment in memory use by each application that I started.

Fujitsu?

I noticed the Hitachi stock drive is quite abit faster with hibernating than the Fujitsu stock drive I had in my previous one.

 

Hitachi. I suspect the bottlenext may be the rest of the hardware since the HDD's transfer rate is nearer 50MB/s (but could write be slower than read? - HD Tune normally tests only the read speed and the NC10 seems to come out of hibernation faster).

John

 

I don't think the average transfer rate measured by HDTune tells the whole story of how fast the drive is in real life. I think the Hitachi hibernated a lot faster than the Fujitsu with the same hardware configuration. Unfortunately I haven't measured the hibernation times with the Fujitsu.

 

If different devices are enabled and/or hve diffrenent drivers their startup/shutdown time could affect the total.

Also there's quite a lot of processing done when hibernating/resuming. This includes identifying and compressing memory blocks written to disk which in theory should be done in parallel with disk writes and will be with a C2D processor, but perhaps not with an N270?

The time needed for this processing will vary depending on what kind of information that has been written to memory, not just the total used.

I read some MS documentation about this when my laptop wouldn't hibernate properly.

 

I have a toshiba mk1652gsx in my system.

 

Interesting. So that makes at least 3 possible hard drives.

 

BTW, I temporarily put a 2GB module in my NC10 and filled up most of the RAM with Paint Shop Pro and lost of photos.

Memory Commit Charge = 1553MB, hibernation = 73s and resume = 45s (to getting the logon prompt).

I then shut down Paint Shop Pro and

Memory Commit Charge = 354MB, hibernation = 19s and resume = 20s with the same 2GB stick on board.

As someone has already noted, another factor in the hibernation time is what running processes have to be shut down.

John

 

Intersting numbers John.

I have timed Windows hibernation/resume times in the past and if I remember right, resume times were longer than hibernate. I'm guessing there was a lot more processing done after the logon prompt in your first example.

 

NeoteriX makes a good point. Windows uses a swap file on the hard drive to emulate additional RAM - although this operates very slowly indeed compared to true RAM. Thus, loading numerous applications in Windows and observing that there is still free physical RAM remaining is not a reliable indicator that your PC would not benefit from more physical RAM. What will tend to happen as you load those apps is that more and more data is placed in the swap file, taking a lot of time to write and to read and thus slowing down the PC.

I've just upgraded to 2Gb and took the opportunity to compare the responses of a freshly booted (no apps running) machine with 1Gb vs. 2 Gb.

The 1Gb machine was allowed to fully boot up. From this state it took 13 seconds to fully hibernate and 16 s to awaken.

Freshly booted with 2Gb fitted it took 17 seconds to fully hibernate and 17 s to awaken. Not only is this only very moderately slower, it's possible it may reflect more of the operating system being held in RAM than in the 1Gb configuration. If that's the case the few additional seconds taken in hibernation may well be recouped by slightly greater responsiveness of the NC10 during use, even when moderate demands are being made upon RAM.

To look at it from the heavy load perspective: if you load an identical long list of applications on a 1Gb and a 2Gb machine and then hibernate each one, the 2Gb will have to write much more to the hard drive so will take much longer than the 1Gb machine. However the 1Gb machine has had to write that same content to the hard disk swap file already, to make up the 1Gb shortfall in RAM. Not only has that taken time (say, in the slower loading of applications), but every time that data was accessed (such as when you switched between applications) you had to wait whilst the swap file was read. On the 2Gb machine, much of the data will have been in fast RAM throughout...

 

We all have our own preferences.

I agree that more RAM helps ensure good performance during use with lots of applications open. However, it is very nice to have the guaranteed snappy hibernation / resume times you will get by keeping with 1GB RAM.

John

 

I don't think 2GB is any faster than 1GB in XP as long as you're not using the swap file.

If someone can show me benchmarks that this incorrect I'd like to see it.

 

If there is any difference in responsiveness between 1Gb and 2Gb when the demands upon RAM are moderate (and I'm not sure there is such a difference), it's certainly small. But it also seems that the increase in hibernation time for 2Gb is only about 20% under such usage, which is a useful figure for folks considering the 'upgrade' to know.

I upgraded 'cos I just can't help being a tinkering geek. I have to admit that in my most common 'netbook' tasks, such as web browsing, there's no real advantage to my £17 investment in 2Gb. But if I end up even just on rare occasions using my NC10 for tasks I'd usually do on my main PC, such as browing hi-res camera images and/or using Photoshop, I think I'll be glad of it. I'll maybe update this thread when (if) I fall below 1Gb free RAM in real-life use: it hasn't happened yet!

 

Vista or XP ?
1Gb or 2Gb Ram ?
Readyboost or no Readyboost ?

Curious ?

Then see the results from a little benchmarking exercise I carried out this evening.

http://sharetheexperience.co.uk/nc10_bench.aspx

 

Thanks. Passmark in a synthetic benchmark though. I'd be interested to see some real life comparisons.

 

Panman - thanks for going to the trouble of compiling all of that. The results seem in keeping with the anecdotal 'real-world' reports I've read. While any attempt to reduce those different configurations to a single dimension of stats is bound to be at some remove from real-world use, it seems to me a useful, non-subjective piece to data for folks to consider.

 

and as it stands I'm still booting into Vista for day to day use but switching back to XP if i fancy a quick blast of UT2004 )