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| On Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:28:57 +0100, "Brian Cryer"
<brian.cryer@127.0.0.1.ntlworld.com> wrote:
>Given that you have 2GB of RAM, how much of that does task manager report as
>being used? I find a good indicator is the page-file usage (PF Usage in task
>manager), if this is well below the amount of physical ram then you won't be
>swapping and adding more RAM won't help. If on the other hand the page-file
>usage approaches 2GB or goes above then either look into whether your pc can
>take more RAM (most can't, although XP will support up to 4GB) and whether
>you can move your page file to another disk.
The goal is not to have pagefile usage below that of
physical ram, the goal is to have the least pagefile usage
possible no matter how much ram.
The more significant comparison for determining if there is
enough memory is:
1) Aggressively use the system, worse case of use with as
many apps, large jobs, etc, as the system will ever see
(often enough that one wants to spend the $ on memory to
combat this use).
2) Next open Task Manager and compare the "Commit Charge",
"Peak" value to the "Physical Memory", "Total" value. The
Peak should always be lower than the Total, by even a few
hundred MB more if you want enough free memory for a
persistent filecache (greatly reducing dependence on HDD
speed for subsequent access to HDD). If working with very
large static files, even more will a large filecache help
but beyond a certain point, some operating system tweaks may
be needed to increase the default size of the cache
supported by windows.
http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/931/
In some cases this cache change can degrade performance
instead of improving it, if the apps use a lot of memory.
One can try it both ways and compare per their use of the
system.
[color=darkred]
>
You're not likely to benefit much from moving to SCSI for
Outlook and Dreamweaver use. As with anything they will
need enough memory (as mentioned above), high memory
throughput (fast memory bus on a modern platform) and fast
CPU. I don't know if Core 2 Duo architecture will benefit
these uses in particular, as much as some, but you might
seek benchmarks of these to determine what performance:$
improvement is acceptable.
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