Posted: 3/29/2003 4:37:06 PM EDT
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I got a new laptop today. It has 512 megs of ram. I'm going to use it for some spread sheets,esitmates,couple of simple games and internet. Is there really a noticeable improvement if I'm not going to run something like autocad on it? |
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You only have too much RAM when...uh...well...ok, get the RAM..hehe For most purposes, 512MB should be fine, even with memory-hungry Win2k or WinXP. Those OS's are generally starving on a 128MB system and marginal on a 256MB system when a couple of apps are open. With 512MB, the OS should have enough elbow room until you have a good half-dozen to a dozen apps open (different apps, not just different windows of the same app...depending heavily on how the app was written, some are poorly written). In theory, there is a downside to the extra memory (minus the cost). That is on a notebook computer, it does take a tiny bit more electricity to power the RAM chips, so it could run your battery down a tiny bit faster. However in practice, the leading theory I've heard is that when you have a ton of RAM on a notebook, the computer is far less apt to access the hard drive for normal Windows operations and thereby save battery power by not going to the battery-hungry drive as much. Speed difference? No, not really. In a year or two it'll probably make a difference as new software is released, but not this year. If it was me? Yeah, I'd definitely go for the extra memory! |