The Plot
My laptop (Inspiron 1420) is now 1.5 years old. Till a few days back It used to run on two beautiful Dual-Channel DIMMs of DDR2 RAM 2X2 @667Mhz. That was a total of 4GB of memory, coupled with a Core2Duo T8300 (2.4Ghz, 800Mhz FSB and 3MB Cache) my laptop was a beast till a couple of days back.
Last year, when I had bought it, it was the best configuration available, this year except for the fact that DDR3 RAMS @ 1033Mhz have made their presence felt, my system’s configuration was still going strong. I was very happy and satisfied with the computing power of my little 14″ device that spends a healthy 6 hours with me daily on an average.
The Twist
In the meantime, my dad’s Inpiron 6400 (3 years old) had 1GB DD2 RAM @ 555Mhz and his predicament was that his system had gone slow.
Geek Fact #1 : The first and foremost disadvantage of being a geek is that your father will surely be aware of the fact that increasing RAM is directly proportional to computer performance.
Geek Fact #2: Its always a good idea to have a spare RAM slot available lest you’ll pay a price
So, DAD asked me to part with “one RAM stick” so that his might increase and I reluctantly agreed because I thought parting with 1GB from 4GB is not a bad position to be in, that too for dad’s laptop. So, I agreed to sacrifice!
The Climax
So, now I am with 2.5GB of RAM. Why 2.5GB you ask? Well, because he had 2 Dims of 512MB each so I gave up on my 2GB Stick and used one of his 512MB one instead. Now, both our systems run at 2.5GB. W000t!!!!
So, how does it all fair? How much performance gain did Dad have and how much I lost?
The Benchmark
Gaining Machine : My Dad’s laptop saw incremental increase in performance, example. His favorite Outlook Express took 1 sec to load from the previous 5 secs! He said multitasking & “lagging” issues were now gone and overall his system was now running smoothly.
Loosing Machine : Somehow, the performance difference for me was not substantial. My load time increased by a couple of seconds and Photoshop was now loading after 2secs delay but apart from that Win7 worked the same way as it did with 4GB. Frankly, there was not much of a difference.
Verdict : 1 week into the gamble, I did not loose much surprisingly while my dad’s computer runs better.
Windows Experience Index, Before and After Pics
Before forced Experiment
Before forced Experiment
After Forced Experiment
Difference was only: 0.4! Everything else remained same. So, for general purpose use with a healthy amount of multitasking, programming, some designing and lots of Firefox. I can proudly say, 2.5GB Rocks!!!
Update : I am not saying more RAM than 2.5GB will not increase performance, the thing is beyond 2.5GB, other factors like Hard Disk’s performance also comes into play. As a HDD is the most slowest and the only mechanical device on which the computer’s speed depends. After 2.5GB of RAM its the limiting factor of the HDD than the better RAM.
Have you ever downgraded or upgraded your RAM? How was it like? What difference did you notice. Feel free to share your experiences with us.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Lol. You were speaking about 2.5 gigs of RAM. Until last month I had only 256 MB. Man, only I knew the suffering. Well as it was a DDR1, I just upgraded it to 1 GB, and God it was like someone had done some magic on my PC. Vrooommm…. that’s how fast it is!!
Congrats! I am sure you must be a happy man. Try a 2GB one and then try a 3GB one. I am sure the difference you see will keep on reducing. The dynamics keep changing here. Though 7 years back, my first PC had 32MB RAM!! Then I got 64MB and 256MB then 1GB then straight 4GB!!!!!
Increasing the RAM by twice the amount or more definitely gives a boost to your computer in terms of running software especially graphics and gaming softwares. I used to have 512 MB on my desktop. Upgrading it to 1GB definitely gave me a great performance boost. I had read somewhere that 32 Windows systems only support upto 4GB of RAM. So anything added beyond that will be useless.
You are absolutely right Kevin. In 32Bit Systems OS can access only 4GB theoretically, in practice only 3.5GB is available as the rest 500MB is referred to the graphics card and other system components.
In order to utilize more than 4GB you need a 64Bit OS. I feel for 64Bit OSes to becomes successful, we need native software/application support. Right now its happening but a bit slowly.
I was actually going to say the same thing. You don’t actually get to utilize all of 4GB on a 32 bit system (http://blogs.msdn.com/hiltonl/archive/2007/04/13/the-3gb-not-4gb-ram-problem.aspx). So, in your case it wasn’t a big loss.
Increasing RAM will almost always show an increase in performance because it reduces the number of times the disk has to be accessed (this is why features such as ReadyBoost in Vista and Win7) are so useful. So, believe it or not, you definitely lost out on some performance. Having said that, it totally depends on the types of applications you use.
Running Win7 64 bit with 5GB of RAM, I am typically using more than 50% at any given time. Now, my system with its ULV processor is really slow, so I compensated by getting lots of RAM and a SSD hard disk.