Ok, I am going for a memory upgrade for my T41 (1.4Ghz) running XP. It currently has 256MB (yeah, but it works fine for the applications I use) and I wanna put a 1gb PC2700 SO-DIMM DDR 333 on the other slot. I have been hearing about performance improvements not being significant in XP beyond a system RAM of 512MB. Has anyone experienced this behavior of XP putting applications (that take up < 512MB) in virtual memory once total system memory utilization reaches say 512MB? Linux certainly doesnt seem to do so. I guess I just wanna hear people talk about improved performace with RAM upgrade.

8/28/2006 12:23:14 PM

more RAM means less memory gets swapped to disk, and the hard drive is the real bottleneck in your system. In addition, hard drives in laptops are generally the 4200 or 5400 rpm variety, much slower overall than 7200rpm drives.

8/28/2006 2:14:45 PM

^ I understand that is true in theory. Are there any tweaks that can be used to set when apps should be swapped to virtual memory in windows xp?

8/28/2006 2:22:33 PM

In my experience, 1GB is the 'sweet spot' for WinXP. You'll see a noticeable change in performance going from 512mb to 1GB. You'll see less of an improvement going from 1GB to 2GB unless you use real memory intensive applications.

8/28/2006 2:59:26 PM