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Re: short on RAM?

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On 11/19/2011 10:09 PM, Bob_Villa wrote:
> On Nov 19, 8:32 pm, mike<spam...@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Rich Greenberg wrote:
>>> Wife gave daughter a new laptop, got back old one, a Dell Inspiration
>>> 600m.  I wiped it and loaded XP sp3++ and it runs fine EXCEPT:
>>
>>> Some of the time she is doing email on AOL's web site it runs so slow
>>> as to be useless.  My first guess is memory.  It only has 1/2 gig of
>>> RAM.  Would another half gig be a good investment?
>>
>> "Except" is the clue pointing to the problem.
>> What does task  manager say about the ram when aol is running?
>> How about cpu load?  Other processes hogging the system?
>> How does it perform on another email website?
>> Current flock of virus scanners assume you have all the memory
>> and cpu power in the world and them some.  When I take a laptop
>> to a swapmeet to sell, I always disable the virus scanner to perk it up.
>>
>> While more ram may help, I rarely upgrade an old laptop past 512MB.
>> 512MB helps a lot over 256, but you're getting into diminishing
>> returns over 512, unless you insist on running a lot of stuff
>> simultaneously.
>> Of course, if the ram is free, load it up.
>> To add ram, I'm guessing you have to throw out all of what's in there. YMMV.
>
> Very much agree!

Not for me! 512MB isn't enough RAM for XPSP3. As the OS itself uses 
800MB+ easy. And with 512MB the OS is going to be swapping in and out of 
memory. And it is going to be slow. The diminishing returns part only 
happens past 1GB.

And Mike, I don't know what you call an old laptop, but laptops from 
2006 are my favorite. I have over a dozen laptops from 2006 alone. I 
like these because they almost always have drivers for XP, Vista, and 
Windows 7. So you can run anything you want. Often can't be said of 
earlier or later made laptops.

And I have been collecting laptops since 1984. And back then and decades 
later, once a laptop was 5 years old or older, it was really outdated 
and too slow to keep up. Sure there was the limit of CPU speed and mass 
storage from the old laptop by then. But the biggest limitation of a 
laptop that old was mainly the memory limit.

But that all changed just before 2006. As in this time laptops could 
have up to 2GB or 4GB of RAM. And we started to see a flood of multiple 
core processors in laptops. So nowadays a 5 year old laptop can often 
indeed keep up with advancing OS and applications we use today. Never 
before in history was this ever possible.

So Rich may have something else going on which slows his laptop down 
which indeed needs to be checked out. But dropping 1GB of RAM will help 
greatly in either case.

-- 
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Thunderbird v3.0
Centrino Core Duo T2400 1.83GHz - 2GB - Windows XP SP3

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Thread

short on RAM? richgr@panix.com (Rich Greenberg) - 2011-11-20 02:02 +0000
  Re: short on RAM? mike <spamme9@gmail.com> - 2011-11-19 18:32 -0800
    Re: short on RAM? Bob_Villa <pheeh.zero@gmail.com> - 2011-11-19 20:09 -0800
      Re: short on RAM? BillW50 <BillW50@aol.kom> - 2011-11-20 02:53 -0600
        Re: short on RAM? Bob_Villa <pheeh.zero@gmail.com> - 2011-11-20 05:40 -0800
          Re: short on RAM? Bob_Villa <pheeh.zero@gmail.com> - 2011-11-20 06:21 -0800
            Re: short on RAM? "BillW50" <BillW50@aol.kom> - 2011-11-20 09:44 -0600
              Re: short on RAM? Bob_Villa <pheeh.zero@gmail.com> - 2011-11-20 19:00 -0800
                Re: short on RAM? "~misfit~" <sore_n_happy@nospamyahoo.com.au> - 2011-12-04 22:51 +1300
                Re: short on RAM? Bob_Villa <pheeh.zero@gmail.com> - 2011-12-04 06:40 -0800
                Re: short on RAM? "~misfit~" <sore_n_happy@nospamyahoo.com.au> - 2011-12-07 15:44 +1300
          Re: short on RAM? "BillW50" <BillW50@aol.kom> - 2011-11-20 09:24 -0600
    Re: short on RAM? richgr@panix.com (Rich Greenberg) - 2011-11-20 16:55 +0000
      Re: short on RAM? BillW50 <BillW50@aol.kom> - 2011-11-20 11:20 -0600
        Re: short on RAM? Tazz <dmswaine@gmail.com> - 2011-11-20 16:08 -0400
          Re: short on RAM? BillW50 <BillW50@aol.kom> - 2011-11-20 14:23 -0600
        Re: short on RAM? richgr@panix.com (Rich Greenberg) - 2011-11-20 20:37 +0000
          Re: short on RAM? BillW50 <BillW50@aol.kom> - 2011-11-20 15:37 -0600
          Re: short on RAM? Tazz <dmswaine@gmail.com> - 2011-11-20 17:46 -0400
          Re: short on RAM? mike <spamme9@gmail.com> - 2011-11-20 14:23 -0800
            Re: short on RAM? richgr@panix.com (Rich Greenberg) - 2011-11-21 00:46 +0000
            Re: short on RAM? Tazz <dmswaine@gmail.com> - 2011-11-21 08:56 -0400

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