Will more memory make a difference?

on new laptop, running adobe and the like

[macrost]

I have 512 DDR with a p4 2.66. When I run homesite and about a gazillion other browsers/ftp clients/music and such.... then when I happen to pull up adobe, everything slows to crawl. My top can support up to 1gb. Just wondering if it would be worth the investment of two 512 sticks.

Thanks!

[moishe]

Assuming you are running XP and did not buy a laptop with no OS and install 98, then the answer would be YES. Laptop hard drives are much slower than desktop hard drives so any time you start working from the hard drive on a laptop, things really slow down. Getting the ram up to 1gig will definitely help and since it is impossible to change video cards in most laptops, adding ram or going for a high end faster hard drive is about all you can do on the hardware side.
Also be sure that you have optimized XP for best performance...

[ogletree]

Yes that will help. You might want to look at a firewire external HDD as well.

[Macro]

>>Just wondering if it would be worth the investment of two 512 sticks.

Sorry, I don't think it'll make the blindest bit of difference. It's a common perception that more RAM will make a PC faster. That is NOT always the case. On benchmarks you'll find that as you keep adding RAM performance increases, then reaches a plateau and then drops. You are pretty much at the plateau and, considering laptop RAM prices, you're wasting your money IMHO. Do a benchmark before the RAM addition, and then one after, and you can decide for yourself.

A lot of things help speed from CPU to hard disk to mobo to type/speed of RAM. Settings in the OS, programs in the background, fragmented hard disk etc all make a difference. For goodness sake address all of those first.

[moishe]

Also be sure that you have optimized XP for best performance...

That is why I said this. In the end, more RAM WILL help. (assuming an OS that can use it) Tweaing XP to it's fullest will also help, eliminate programs from startup, set XP for best performance, scan for scumware, etc etc.

[ggrot]

The simplest way to check is to open up a process viewer. If you are using more than 512 MB of memory by the current running set of processes, then you can speed things up by increasing RAM. If you aren't, then the RAM will not help at all.

[macrost]

Well it seems that I may have stirred up a nest! I have a script that defrags every night, so fragmented disk is not a problem.

Right now, i have 118k of memory available to me. That is with 11 programs running right now. ducks!

My pagefile usage is pretty low, only 412mb.

I have 59 total processes running right now.

[chubba]

Adobe what? Illustrator or Photoshop?

Some <cough>demo</cough> versions of Photoshop are no better than beta copies and will cause a higher load on your machine.

If a legit copy have you installed all upgrades and patches.

Also the size of the images you are working with will have an effect - if you are working on 10Mb + psd's then it will need more memory to work on it.

Also do you have your hard drive partitioned? If so make sure that the primary scratch disk is set to not be your C drive...

Hope this might be of some help,

Chubba

[isitreal]

when I happen to pull up adobe

Any of the adobe products like photoshop are massive resource hogs, or maybe better put, they require a massive amount of memory resources to work efficiently, keep in mind when you click 'undo' 10 times and your 5 mB file happily goes back to its earlier versions almost instantly this is because of all the ram photoshop, or fireworks, has requested.

If you use photoshop routinely, or any other major image processing program, then upgrading to 1 gig ram is a very good idea. No other apps will force this memory upgrade, you can open as many as you want and your system will probably still have many mB free, but open up a graphics app and the memory is used up. Same might go for video editing, I would assume so, though I've never used or tested that.

[Sports Workout]

this may be a 'newbie' question but:

how do i optimize my OS (xphome)? what settings are the best for speed and performance?

[sidyadav]

I have about the same hardware as Mac. Photoshop runs fine with FTP, Dreamweaver and all, the only thing which causes a slowdown on my computer is a huge word doc I'm work on, approximately 300 pages long. May get an old-but-usable laptop for this purpose.

Sid