Does 2Gb make a difference to you?

Priapus · 27 Mar 2007 at 08:50

Morning all,

I am wondering, for those of us who are running Windows Vista, does having 2Gb of memory really make that much of a difference to you?

I have 1Gb in my Vista Ultimate machine and last night I added another 1Gb stick, just to see if it would make that much of a difference. The only time I see it making a real difference is in the first 10 seconds of start up after logon and playing games, that's about it. other it is still the same as one gig of memory..

Just me?

BoomAM · 27 Mar 2007 at 09:15

Cant comment on Vista, but 2Gb makes a big difference to me in XP. I'd imagine just as much if not more so when i move to Vista as well.

The thing that people forget about Vista is that although it has a 'high' memory usage, its not actually boated, its because its caching a lot of stuff, as well as the Aero interface, into memory, so the system is faster. Memory is there to be used, and Vista is using it.

Meatball · 27 Mar 2007 at 09:17

2gb made a diff for me in XP when working with high-res photos in photoshop

Helped a lot during multi tasking to

Priapus · 27 Mar 2007 at 09:30

I know where it would make a difference. I know Vista uses the memory mach better then XP Professional. Or Home.

So it's worth me keeping it in the system anyway?

Meatball · 27 Mar 2007 at 09:40

Ice On Fire said:
I know where it would make a difference. I know Vista uses the memory mach better then XP Professional. Or Home.

So it's worth me keeping it in the system anyway?

Yes

2gb is beginning to become mainstream and many games are using over 1gb of ram.

Priapus · 27 Mar 2007 at 09:45

Ah, okay. Will see what I can do to keep it.

The extra one gig will then go to my girlfriends computer. :cool:

the-void · 27 Mar 2007 at 11:05

The more applications you run concurrently the more RAM you will need to avoid the PC slowing down due to paging data in and out of memory to the hard drive.

However applications such as video editing or image manipulation require as much ram as you can throw at them.

Games also require as much RAM as you can throw at them as well. I remember when games used to weigh in at 300-400mb and happily ran on 512mb of memory. These days games weigh in at 5-8Gb. I find these figures speak for themselves.

However, if all your doing is basic word processing and web browsing and nothing else then 1gb is fine.

Girdag · 27 Mar 2007 at 11:09

the-void said:
I remember when games used to weigh in at 300-400mb and happily ran on 512mb of memory.

So, about 3 years back, then?

the-void · 27 Mar 2007 at 11:21

Girdag said:
So, about 3 years back, then?

Correct. Over a 1000% increase in game size in 3 years is quite considerable when you compare it to a 400% increase in RAM in the same period. :eek:

Will_3rd · 27 Mar 2007 at 11:26

deffo 2GB for XP, the same for Vista

especially noticeable when I play BF2 etc

Girdag · 27 Mar 2007 at 11:30

the-void said:
Correct. Over a 1000% increase in game size in 3 years is quite considerable when you compare it to a 400% increase in RAM in the same period.

I've only really been shocked by my STALKER install. 10 GB? TEN GIGABYTES? What is it DOING?

Oblivion + all the mods I run takes more than that, but then that's to be expected.

Deleted member 58846 · 27 Mar 2007 at 11:30

2GB is definatly needed for gamers, as for office users 512 to 1gb is essential now.

Psycho Sonny · 27 Mar 2007 at 12:18

errr i have 4GB of ram and in vista my ram usage never drops below 1.2GB so i would say 2GB is essential and vista does need it but can run fine without it, currently the only program i have running is internet explorer and its using over a gig, i have steam, daemon tools, msn, avg, any dvd and everest running in the taskbar

Priapus · 27 Mar 2007 at 12:34

I think you guys maybe right. when I was playing games last night on the two gig, it did run better, only NFS: Carbon gave me issues.

Spleenus · 27 Mar 2007 at 12:48

Psycho Sonny said:
errr i have 4GB of ram and in vista my ram usage never drops below 1.2GB so i would say 2GB is essential and vista does need it but can run fine without it, currently the only program i have running is internet explorer and its using over a gig, i have steam, daemon tools, msn, avg, any dvd and everest running in the taskbar

Just remember that because you have the available memory Vista is caching much more, it doesn't mean it's essential to have 2Gb as Vista runs just fine on 1Gb until you do start loading in some hefty games.

bledd · 27 Mar 2007 at 13:25

2gb in xp makes a big difference, let alone vista

hardc0re_tid · 27 Mar 2007 at 14:06

gaming, photoshop cs2 - yes, general windows usgae - not really

Cosimo · 27 Mar 2007 at 14:06

Makes all the difference for Photoshop and multi-tasking.

Psycho Sonny · 27 Mar 2007 at 14:19

Spleenus said:
Just remember that because you have the available memory Vista is caching much more, it doesn't mean it's essential to have 2Gb as Vista runs just fine on 1Gb until you do start loading in some hefty games.

well caching stuff makes it in turn run faster when you use it rather than going to the hard drive to get it first, i wish vista cached 3GB of stuff and left 1GB for usage then my pc would be uber fast

Priapus · 27 Mar 2007 at 15:22

Looks like the 2Gb will be staying then as I like multi-Tasking and using PhotoShop plus my visual Studio.

Will just put the 1Gb OCZ PC3200 into my girlfriends XP machine, should speed it up abit!

Does 2Gb make a difference to you?

Deleted member 58846

Deleted member 58846