Oh, The Memory!

One of the most effective upgrades anyone can get for their PC is more memory (RAM, for Random Access Memory). If you have a PC that is four to six years old, or only a year or two old, check the amount of memory you have on your current computer. In the present economy, unless you need the latest and greatest hardware, you would be surprised how much improvement can be had just by increasing the amount of ram in your older computer. Upgrading the memory is the least expensive way to squeeze more performance out of an older system. Of course this is assuming the rest of your hardware is in good condition, and your motherboard will allow a higher quantity of ram. If you have to replace more than memory, the upgrading could quickly become cost prohibitive.

The big brand names in the computer industry have historically been stingy with the ram they install on their PCs,
although with the release of Windows Vista, they have done a better job of providing adequate amounts of ram. They are in the business of selling computers, and every cost reduction is perceived to be an advantage.

Recently, a client brought her PC to me describing it as “frustratingly slow”. Pop-ups were also appearing all the time on the screen. The computer, a five year old off the shelf name brand with Windows XP Pro and two 64 megabyte sticks of PC133 memory, was a recent gift from her daughter. I was concerned the computer only had 128 megabytes of memory, as Microsoft’s list of system requirements includes “128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended.” My first thought was “how did her daughter ever get any use out of this thing?” Believe me, it is an understatement to say Microsoft’s starting point of 128 MB is incredibly optimistic. Even after several trojans, viruses and other malware were cleaned from her computer, the machine was still practically paralyzed.

With only a total of 128 MB of ram, boot up was a ten minute affair, during which the hard drive was churning nonstop. This was due to excessive swapping of data in and out of the Windows “paging file”, also known as “swap file”. The paging or swap file is a dedicated area of hard drive space into which data in memory can be written so as to free up the memory for other tasks. When the other tasks have been completed, the data can then be read from the paging file back into main memory. Thus, your hard drive can serve as “virtual memory”, but it is a verrrry slooow process compared to real memory operations. I exchanged two 128 megabyte sticks of PC133 memory for the two 64 megabyte sticks (there are only two memory slots on her mother board), and rebooted to find performance was considerably improved. Even though her computer was running much better on 256 MB of memory, 512 MB would be even better, and 1 gigabyte (GB) of memory is a real sweet spot for Windows XP. Beyond 1 GB it is difficult to discern any increase in performance unless you work with several open programs at the same time. Performance with 256 MB was very acceptable to my client, and because the older PC133 memory is more expensive than the current mainstream memory, she opted to stop at 256 MB rather than invest an extra $55 to bump the ram to 512 MB.

Windows Vista recommended system requirement is “1 GB of system memory.” This is published for Home Premium and above editions. Vista Basic’s recommended is 512 MB. If Microsoft recommends 1 GB for Vista, how is it that almost all PC models come with at least 2 GB memory, and most come with more? As 60 Minutes’ Andy Rooney would ask, “Why is that?”

How about you? Have you upgraded to more memory before or are you contemplating doing so now? What do you think about Microsoft’s recommended memory?