tx650 & 1g ram..worth putting in?..

mine came with 512..by adding 1g will this significantly boost the speed of the comp?..i.e..booting up time..etc?

 

No, it won't impact boot time in the least. For productivity stuff, I'd stick with the 512 for that machine.

 

why wouldn't it impact boot time? What does addidional RAM impact? If you put in additional memory, what tests can you run to test the new memory?

 

of course itll shorten boot time... and not just for this machine.. but all machines. the tx uses 4200 RPM hd so any thing that will allow for less swapping is good.

monster... its definitely worth $70 to plug in a 1GB chip in.

 

My comment came off wrong, it will shorten it, but not significantly. I've tested with a similar setup and the change is negligible.

 

Boot up time is the time it takes to build the tables & stuff required by Windows in RAM. Adding RAM doesn't help boot time much. As HerbieC suggested, a faster disk would help. Defragging that disk helps (but not as much). The programs you auto-load make a huge difference (look at Run / MSConfig).

Additional RAM can reduce swapping - if you tend to have lots of windows open at the same time. Each task needs it's piece of RAM. The more RAM you have, the more tasks you can have loaded without swapping to virtual disk.

Another use for more RAM is using programs that take huge amounts of data, such as photo-editing.

One disadvantage of more RAM is a slower hibernate time. To hibernate, Windows places an exact copy of RAM onto a special file on disk. The more RAM, the bigger the hibernate file, the longer to write the file, and the longer to read it when you come out of hibernation.

 

Hi guys. I am gearing up for purchasing TX650 as well. I am going to local Sony store and test drive it for myself which include the booting process etc.

I really think that the system needs any more than 512MB RAM if you are not looking to load insane number of applications at once or open really really large photoshop projects or other graphic/game applications.

With 512MB of ram, there should not be any swaping (paging) needed since there are free RAM in physical RAM. I think paging is only needed when Windows cannot allocate free physical RAM space (I took operating system class long time ago .. so I cannot remember well). I cannot possibly think that Windows wipes out 512MB physical ram in the boot up process. My current desktop currently has 512MB RAM and only 50% of RAM is occupied by Windows. This 50% include the free space that windows think it needs for future applications. So, even if I open 5 instances of IE, Word, and EXcel all together, Windows won't need to allocate anymore than what's already allcated previously. I had my desktop for about 3.5 yrs now, and I never felt my system suffered it's performance due to paging.

Now, with notebooks, the bottle neck that I can think of is HDD RPM and system bus between RAM, CPU, and I/O devices (this is rather complicated to discuss and i do not remember too good). This HDD is only 4200RPM and may cause performance issue, especially when loading Windows, since boot up process involves a large amount of HDD access (you can actually compute how much time it will take based on it's seek time and rpm, but i do not know seek time for this HDD that TX uses.)

I know what I am going to do first when I get my TX; wipe out HDD, install Debian

 

I just tried TX651. Too me 512MB worked fine. With bunch of crap loaded on there were still 150MB free physical RAM.

 

I multitask a lot and run a lot of intensive programs at times. So more memory, the better. I'm also a memory hog, have no patience for anything. If I could get 3gb of RAM on my machine, I probably would.

 

same here

 

One thing to keep in mind is that it has integrated graphics, the GMA 900 to be exact, which can take up to 128 megs of system ram.