Subjective impression of performance when I upgraded from 2G
Okay I have a Dell 9200 with a Quad Core QX6600 CPU. I upgraded from 2Gb to 4Gb (WinXP on this rig only sees 3Gb which is normal). For $55 this was a no-brainer upgrade considering I'm a fairly heavy power user and I use VMWare a lot. What surprised me (and I really never expected this) is that I definitely feel a subjective performance improvement in the response of the desktop. This really took me by surprise. Now there's no way I even come close to using even 2Gb under normal circumstances but even with one Window open (like Firefox right at the moment) and task manager reporting that I'm only using 340Mb of RAM, the desktop feels much snappier than it did with 2Gb and I've been analyzing this long enough now to be convinced that it's not a psychological trick. I have to assume that the reason for this is that the extra RAM is forcing Windows to use less virtual memory. I never changed my swap file settings when I upgraded the ram I'm still using the default settings that Windows came up with when it installed of 2Gb initial/ 4Gb maximum, current size 2Gb. I'd be curious if anyone else has seen this when upgrading from 2Gb.
Okay I have a Dell 9200 with a Quad Core QX6600 CPU. I upgraded from 2Gb to 4Gb (WinXP on this rig only sees 3Gb which is normal). For $55 this was a no-brainer upgrade considering I'm a fairly heavy power user and I use VMWare a lot. What surprised me (and I really never expected this) is that I definitely feel a subjective performance improvement in the response of the desktop. This really took me by surprise. Now there's no way I even come close to using even 2Gb under normal circumstances but even with one Window open (like Firefox right at the moment) and task manager reporting that I'm only using 340Mb of RAM, the desktop feels much snappier than it did with 2Gb and I've been analyzing this long enough now to be convinced that it's not a psychological trick. I have to assume that the reason for this is that the extra RAM is forcing Windows to use less virtual memory. I never changed my swap file settings when I upgraded the ram I'm still using the default settings that Windows came up with when it installed of 2Gb initial/ 4Gb maximum, current size 2Gb. I'd be curious if anyone else has seen this when upgrading from 2Gb.