At 11:15 PM 02/13/2001 Susan Hays wrote: > >Is there a lot of difference in performance between having >128 vs 256MB Ram? 2-128's vs 1-256? Susan The previous advice given is correct. If all you do is add another 128MB of RAM, you may not see any difference. There is, however, a potential performance advantage in having more RAM. Your management of the greater memory resources can exploit the difference and appreciably increase performance. The $50-ish investment in 128MB of RAM is worth it, unless you have a pokey hard drive or video card and need to upgrade those instead. If you are willing to play around and tweak your settings, you can make the PC with 256 MB run faster than a 128 MB system. You have to manually set various caches in Windows and your applications, perhaps configuring a RAM drive to cache browsed web pages and copy code (and set paths) to reduce hard drive I/O. You might run into more complications than the advantage warrants (it all depends on your hardware and software). There is a bleeding edge on the learning curve. May not be worth it if, after all the work and Windows crashes, you only get a 5% boost. There's a good "In a Nutshell" O'Reilly book called "Optimizing Windows" that proffers many of the tricks and tips. Magazines and PCBUILD members post good tips all the time. Everyone has their own little tweaks, though many seem like voodoo, unless you happen to have that rare combination of hardware and software that makes the trick "work". Sometimes just thinking your system is faster makes you work faster so you do gain productivity (there is no spoon). Regarding a pair of 128MB DIMMs vs. one 256MB DIMM, some folks recommend the pair because they believe in spreading eggs into different baskets. That's risk management. I don't believe DIMMs are interleaved, as were older SIMMs to enhance performance on some asynchronous memory bus motherboards (please correct me if erroneous). The main issue is matching the DIMM pairs. All things being equal (and assuming well-designed, quality parts), the single 256MB DIMM may potentially run faster than 2x128MB DIMMs because there may be differences between the two DIMMs, such as in memory chip type, access time, voltage, refresh rate (cell leakage), memory skew, heat, circuit design, metals, etc., which may somehow require the setting of a less than optimal memory timing for stability's sake. The single DIMM should be internally consistent while two DIMMs have a potential for less-than-perfect compatibility (e.g., opposite ends of acceptable parameters). Well-constructed DIMM circuit boards are as important as the memory chips mounted on them. However, SDRAM these days are pretty good, so this is mostly a non-issue (but try to match your DIMMs anyway). Overclockers' experiences can help advise you on CMOS memory timing settings, where better and/or matched RAM allow faster settings. Your mileage may vary.... Hope this helps. Good luck. John Chin The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech support at our newest website: http://freepctech.com