PC hardware forum: 2GB vs. 4GB Ram for Vista Home Premium?

Vista as supplied will show from 3 to 3.5 GB of RAM. It has to do with the address space is also used for other things. Some owners seem upset with that.

It's also well known that past 2GB there is little gain.

Bob

do you have the 32 or 64bit version?.
32 I assume and do you plan on doing vid editing?. or just transfers.
either way the extra mem will help despite what the others say.
profit says that theres little gain is false. when doing vid editing and such more mem is always good.

I got my system recently with 2gb. Bought 1GB from Crucial for 61.99
Works great with 3gb.

In XP we saw very little payback past 1GB. In Vista there is some payback from 1 to 2GB but the payback that I've seen from 2 to 3 only shows in benchmarks and then in the single digits. Your choice here.

On my system, I run both WinXP and Vista, and I've been able to see how well they both take advantage of the extra memory (1 GB of DDR2 533 MHz v. 2 GB of DDR2 667 MHz)

In XP, the difference was really negligible and I really couldn't tell a huge difference other than things that would use way more memory than they did before. Example: iTunes running cover flow for a library of over 4000 tracks gobbled up a whopping 800 MB or so of memory!!! I can have a ton of stuff open either way and don't really have any problems in XP.

With Vista, things were a bit different. First off though, let me say that Vista does run well on 1 GB of RAM and that I had no problems running it with that much. That said, I was able to tell a pretty significant difference in how well everything ran when I upped it from 1 GB to 2GB. I can only guess that adding that extra gigabyte of memory would probably provide a little extra kick comparable to the extra kick XP experienced when moving from 1 GB to 2 GB.

If you need more than 2 GB, simply add another 2 GB rather than buying just 1 GB. If it works well enough in spite of the fact that only 3 GB will show, just leave it. When you feel the need to unlock that extra potential stored away in that last gigabyte, just order your 64-bit copy of Vista. If you have a copy of the retail software, you can obtain a 64-bit copy at no extra charge other than shipping. Going 64-bit has its own challenges, but if you have the need, go for it!

For just a little bit more then the price of 4Gb of ram you could buy a 32Gb ram drive. This may be the least reported but biggest news in the computing world. This is poised to go into production systems in 2008; but why wait? A ram drive is a Hard drive in name only; because in actuality it is pure ram that is used in place of the HD. Today you CAN buy a 32Gb ram drive to replace your HD for around $320. Talk about a speed increase. Starting and loading office for instance would load up and run using a (physical) ram drive as quick as if you already had it loaded in from a normal HD and sitting down in the task bar and it loads and runs as fast as if you had simply clicked on it down in the tray and had it pop up on the desktop.
These new ram drives include a battery back up system to retain information when the system is shut down. Laptops in Japan already have the option of replacing a 120Gb normal HD with a 32Gb ram drive. These new Ram Drive are NOT what most techs are use to thinking of a ram drive where you load information into a segment of ram and use it as a ram drive; but rather a *physical* ram drive that is used as the *primary* hard drive for the system.

For 60.00 it was worth it to me.

I have 4 x 1Gb of DDR2 533MHz, but in windows read 3326 Mb. When I go in BIOS there shows 4 slots of 1 Gb DDR2 533MHz and that is OK. My motherboard can support 8Gb. Why in Vista read lower? Thank you

5 years is quite a while to go without any upgrades (well @ least for gaming it is (I'm a gamer)). 4 gigs is alot (the max Vista will do I think) but if you want it to last 5 years I would bump it up to 4 gigs.

You also might want to consider upgrading to Vista Ultimate. It doesn't need anymore RAM then premium and it has some features & tools to keep your computer running good for the 5 years, as I say again 5 years is quite awhile. But if you stick with Premium that is certiantly good eneugh.

You don't need to buy Vista Ultimate to gain ReadyBoost capabilities for a thumb drive. My HP Pavilion Media Center computer has Vista Home Premium with 3 GB of RAM installed. When I want to start the memory-intensive Flight Simulator X software, I add a 2 GB thumb drive. Without it, I tend to get an Out of Memory error from the software after a while. With the thumb drive, I haven't seen that error yet.

I recall getting my first 386 PC with my guru bro-in-law in the early 90's. 2mb of RAM...512 mb HD...he bumped it to 4mb of RAM.

A few weeks later, I made the bold statement that someday there would be a need for 2 to 4 GB of hard drive and 256mb of RAM.

He told me I was nuts.

I say, go for the 4 GB now, BUT, shop around. The cost of your extra 2 GB sounds very expensive, unless you are having someone install it for you.

You can find great deals on RAM at Tiger Direct and other such sites.

A year to 18 months from now, when you have bought some new programs and updated others AND when advancements we can't comprehend NOW will be casually accepted, you will be glad you "wasted" the money now.

Some hungry developer is going to work on all of the problems mentioned here, and there will be solutions in the not too distant future.

Also, don't forget that there will always be new advances in peripherals, and this will likely come into play in your need for RAM.

Besides, if you get 3mb now, depending on the configuration of your mother board, you will likely have to trash the 1GB to add the 2GB the other 2 GB.

I'm now looking forward to the days of 256GB of RAM and 4 TB of HD.

Heck, my Blackjack Smartphone already accepts a 2 GB micro SD chip...and I am sure making use of it.

ALWAYS dream ahead in the PC world...

Vista includes a handy new performance monitoring tool called resource monitor. The way I get to it is by doing a ctrl-alt-del, bringing up task manager, switching to the performance tab and clicking the resource monitor button. The statistic you want to look at is 'hard faults' under memory. I find the naming to be a little odd, but a hard fault is when Windows has to read or write to the page file rather than RAM. When I had 1GB RAM, I was frequently seeing well above 1000 faults/min for some processes. If you aren't seeing above 500 or so hard faults/min for the processes you think you need more memory for, you probably don't need more RAM. I wouldn't pay much attention to your virus scanner, or this statistic within a few minutes after starting Windows. With 3GB, my AV program (AVG,) still gets a lot of hard faults, and as Windows is starting, several processes do.
Video transcoding/editing may not take as much memory as you may think. Most transcoding utilities I have consume 1-200MB at most. Uncompressed DVD quality video is only about 0.5MB/frame. DVD compression doesn't usually need to deal with more than 30 frames at a time, so you can see it doesn't have a large memory footprint. Editing programs may take more because they tend to be bloated software.

"the 1 gig that doesnt show on vista 32 bit would be used to help Pci hardware.. e.g soundcars etc.. so its not all lost"

That's some drival or bad excuse you are hearing around sales counters today. It's a sure sign they are unaware how computers work.

Remember these are salespeople talking to consumers. They need these lies to keep from wasting time on the truth.

Bob