Installed my 2 gigs of ram... Not noticing a difference from 1 gig in Vista Ultimate.

I'm surprised. According to everyone I should be noticing a huge difference, the sky should be falling, etc, but it's not.

Games run better, yes, but Vista runs like Xp for me. I am not noticing a difference in speed from 1 gig to 2 gig.

I could play games perfectly, at high resolutions, with 1 gig of ram.

Maybe I have teh magic touch and you people just suck, which is why I keep sayign Vista is great...

If I saw how badly Vista was running on your machines, I'd bash Vista too..

EDIT: Well, one difference. Physical memory has gone down from around 75% usage to 30% usage. But the speed in Vista itself is exactly the same.

It can't be the ram either, part of my 512 megs of 667 ram was Alienware, part of it was horrid PNY, which slowed it down...

This ram should be far faster.

 

Well if physical memory usage has changed you know that you installed it correctly which leads me to believe that perhaps 1GB was enough for the tasks you are running or that you expected far too much from the upgrade. It could also be that none of your apps/games were bottlenecked by 1GB.

Just a few musings.

 

Do you use Readyboost? THG had an articel about it a while ago. They tested the use of Readyboost and found that Readyboost worked fine for 1GB but didnt speed up anything with 2GB Ram.
1GB + readyboost compared to 2gb + readboost lessens the differance.

 

Run some memory intensive tasks, like playing Rainbow Six : Las Vegas. It made my notebook slow to a crawl.

 

I suspect this is because for whatever reasons, you've never had to page that much with 1GB. We can attribute this to superior memory management in Vista...or memory efficiency in the applications you use.

 

I bet if you do a clean install. Then you would notice a big difference.

 

Yeah and clean out any bloatware or system power hogging anti-virus.

 

Shouldn't that be

"You may notice a difference on a clean install"?

How does it go? If it isn't broke... and besides suggesting a reformat doesn't make sense? That infers a clean system. So if Zellio running an "un-streamlined" system is doing OK by all accounts, I don't see what a reformat would do?

This is not a flame post. I am genuinely curious why a reformat would be suggested. I am not asking for the standard "make your system lean and mean" answer. Emphasis that Zellio's system is running fine (by his OP) as it is now

 

I envy you and pity you at the same time.

I envy you because you can run Vista with 1GB of RAM and not have any problems, while I'm using 1.5GB and I find myself waiting quite often.

I pity you because you bought a brand new gigabyte of memory and you aren't noticing any difference.

Matt

 

You probably don't run programs with large memory usage other than games, and probably not concurrently. Graphics programs and the like will really slow down your machine if you don't have enough memory, which is the main reason I went with 2 gigs. For general usage though, over a gig won't help a ton, but it will help eventually, given another refresh or two of MS Office, etc. I'll bet you also "tune" your machine to remove most startup programs, shut down almost everything when gaming, etc., which makes having 2GB less important.

 

"I'll bet you also "tune" your machine to remove most startup programs, shut down almost everything when gaming, etc., which makes having 2GB less important."

Now that part your right, but I do use 3d editing software, as well as soundforge... Photoshop...

It's not really on my laptop though so I can't see if their's a difference.

But I do notice 1 huge difference though. Games like Dark Messiah, I can now enable settings which require 512 meg cards, and my card is 256 megs :-X

 

Two points here. First, of course you only see the difference when running memory intensive appps (such as games). When just running Vista, I'd be scared if it used more than 1 GB.

Second, you tend to notice the difference more when you go the opposite way. Try removing the extra ram in a week or two, and see how it feels. That's usually a better way to tell if there's a difference.

 

Good points!

 

You're correct there's essentially no speed difference between XP and Vista. When I installed Vista on my laptop w/ 2gb mem it sometimes ran slower. I have the feeling this slowness is due to Vistas' additional eye candy running in the background, Alero and such. The graphics are great with it's 3D effects but at a cost of performance hits. Yes Vista uses memory more prudently but still in it's infancy. Not enough software/hardware drivers supports so it's back to XP for me for now.

 

I'm thinking it may be because I've used Vista for about a month on the laptop and Vista's self tuning has kicked in...

 

Vista does put most if not all of your ram to use. What you see used, is what is being used by programs. Where in reality the rest of it is being used as a cache to boost performance. If you have Vista go to the "performance" tab in the task manager and look at how much is cached and how much is free. On my computer at the moment this was typed: (In MB) Total=2045, Cached=1363, Free=60. Out of my 2GB of ram only 60MB is free.

 

I'm pretty sure Vista doesn't actually page the superfetched contents to the hard drive unless they have been used, it just wouldn't make sense performance or logistics-wise. Therefore, it is preferable to have all of your RAM in use as cache at all times, so that programs you often use will insta-launch on demand with no speed penalty from hard disk access. If a non-cached program has to be loaded into memory from the hard drive, then it should simply overwrite the least used cached contents in memory.

 

You aren't using big images or massive filters in Photoshop though, I'd wager I've done work on some 4000x4000 and larger planar images, and that's when the extra RAM becomes necessary. For most photo manipulation and such, you really don't use a ton of memory until you start doing long chains of filters with full undo history. And for 3D models, again, if you're doing game models, it won't need that much memory. Only when you're doing full-detail, high poly count modeling does extra memory become necessary.

Glad Dark Messiah is working better for you, though

 

That cache only boosts performance if the data that is stored in it is actually needed though. If only, say, 600MB of data is needed total, then it doesn't matter if it caches the entire internet in the rest of your RAM. Because it won't be accessed. Only these first 600MB matter. And that is pretty much what's happening when you run Vista with no other RAM-consuming apps. It actively uses only those ~600MB. It might well load other data into the remaining RAM just in case it's needed, but unless you start programs that need loads of RAM, it won't be. So it won't make a difference.