"John John" wrote in message
...
Eric wrote:
They recommend 128MB? It does run OK on 128MB. I believe it does run on
64MB though.
Of course 512MB is nicer, but so is 2GB. The more RAM you give it, the
smoother it will run. If you do anything that uses much RAM, it will
just use the swap file if it runs out. Just make sure you keep enough
free HD space.
Same goes for any OS. Win98 can run on 16MB, Vista can run on 1GB maybe
even less. The more you get, the smoother they run.
If you increase any one component past a certain point, you just shift
the bottleneck. Any one piece can be the weakest link for performance
(CPU, RAM, video speed, video RAM, BUS, HD...).

Above a certain amount of RAM any additional RAM added to the machine is
just a waste of money and it will not make the computer run any faster or
smoother. Where that "magic" amount lies depends on what you do with your
computer and what type of applications you run, if your computer is not
paging then adding extra RAM will do nothing to make your computer run
better, faster or smoother. Many XP users, I would say half or more of XP
users, don't need much more than 512MB of RAM and other than those doing
multimedia/AV editing or those running CAD/CAM and very large spreadsheets
or other demanding programs few users ever need or use more than 1GB.
Users who barely use 512MB will not see a bit of difference when adding
additional RAM to their computers. We see occasional posts in the XP
groups where users have increased RAM from 512MB or 768MB to 1GB and more
and they disappointedly report no performance gains. The reason they see
no gains is that they weren't using what they already had to work with.

John

Exactly, but there is no one "magic number". XP runs perfectly smooth with
128 MB of RAM for the average user who does very little.
There are a number of bottlenecks. Adding more RAM will always make it
smoother, if you're actually doing processing that uses RAM (ie image/video
editing). 512MB is much more than needed if all you do is check email.
It's also too much if your PC is 400MHz, or you do a lot of processing which
has to do constant read/write to disk. For the average user, more RAM (at
least above 512MB) will probably not be their best upgrade option, but I
wouldn't necessarily call it a bad idea. I have 1 GB in this machine and
Windows reports quite a bit less than half of physical memory available.

To spend money wisely on upgrading, you'll want to start with the minimum
RAM (16MB for Win98/ME, 128MB for XP, 1GB for Vista), then make sure the CPU
is fast enough, then make sure the HD is big enough, then check the video
speed/memory, then at least double the minimum RAM, make sure the monitor is
big and clear enough, double the RAM again...
Of course if you're on the web much the first and biggest bottleneck is web
connection speed. The biggest baddest PC will always look pathetic on
dialup.