On 23 Jun 2008 at 19:50, Russ Cox wrote:

> I have a NEC Versa laptop, 1.8 GHz Pentium M with 768 MB RAM running
> Vista basic. Seems to run a bit slow. I know more memory is good, but
> am I likely to see a noticeable improvement if I move up to 1.5 GB
> RAM? 


  There are two different memory sizes to be considered, and the exact 
answer is going to depend on the mix of applications you typically run.

  For any given mix of running processes, and amount of data (such as the 
size of Word documents open, etc), there is some size which is enough that 
can possibly be needed, and adding memory beyond that point cannot improve 
anything.
  But a more important number is the *minimum* amount of RAM needed to get 
acceptable performance.  Each application process has a "working set" of 
memory, which consists of all of the heavily used parts such that swapping 
things to/from virtual memory on disk becomes rare enough to be tolerable; 
this is usually a fraction of the task's entire virtual memory size.

  That said, OS and programs seem to grow with every generation.  Certainly 
my XP boxes are happier with 1.5-2.5 GB of RAM than they were with 512-768 
MB, but I tend to carry a fairly heavy application load.  That *might* be 
overkill for you.

David Gillett

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