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22 Posts

March 18th, 2004 21:00

My friend's 800mhz athlon w/128mb ram runs XP as fast as my 2.2ghz Athlon w/256mb ram. For surfing, office, light games  all you need is 128mb

3 Posts

March 29th, 2004 17:00

I am not sure. I'd say that 128mb is the minimum, My laptop has 192mb ram and it runs fine. The computer i'm getting has a gig of ram. The more ram, the faster and more reliable the system.

1 Message

March 29th, 2004 17:00

I have 384MB on my D8100 w/XP, but  I noticed sluggishness on it even on sending a print job or plain browsing.  So I checked the performance tab and showed running at 40%-45% of its memory.  Can someone give me a clue on how to increase the performance?  I've already closed antivirus, firewall, ad blocker etc to see if it improves and it only goes up a couple of % but still below 50%.  Please help

3 Posts

March 29th, 2004 17:00

I am not sure. I'd say that 128mb is the minimum, My laptop has 192mb ram and it runs fine. The computer i'm getting has a gig of ram. The more ram, the faster and more reliable the system.

3.0ghz w/HT
1024mb ram
120gig hard drive
128mb video card
Dolby digital 5.1 sound card
Quiet Keyboard
Optical Mouse
17"CRT

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22 Posts

March 29th, 2004 18:00

With 128mb, I have 60mb free (available) memory with several IE6 sessions running. IE6 comes up in approx 3 secs and new instances come up in <1 sec. There is more HD activity (paging) with 128 but the delay is only when switching applications that have been paged out. I can easily run Excel, Word, 8 IE6 sessions and outlook with 30-40mb available memory.

With 256mb boot time was 12 secs slower (including post) and hibernate was of course twice as slow.

System tested was a PII 400mhz with 6.4GB HD 5400rpm 9msec access 512k cache

Try observing your process activity with this excellent 'process explorer' tool which is like an expanded version of task manager.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml

 

As a last resort, reformat and install XP so you can establish a baseline for how your system should perform.

 

 

 

54 Posts

April 4th, 2004 03:00

As far as im concerned, the minimum amount of RAM for XP is more than any motherboard now-days can support. haha.  (but 256MB is what i would concider the minimum, with 512MB being a much better starting point)

61 Posts

April 24th, 2004 04:00

One should never consider what is 'enough' but what is'at the very minimum', as we know, windows system always keep taking much of our system source and has endless will to expand. As for myself, I use 256 ram, whether it will be enough mostly depend on what you use the computer to do. To myself, it's enough.

1 Message

April 27th, 2004 18:00

If you are looking for a true return on investment with low total cost of ownership over a 5 year period

and don't want to have to pay for a mid-life RAM upgrade (where the labor is a significant cost)

and as RAM pre-installed is significanly cheaper

For wordprocess/spreadsheet - 512Mb

For graphic manipulation - 1Gb (preferably 2)

For CAD - 2Gb

 

 

 

May 2nd, 2004 02:00

i have 1GB of ram and that is  what i think xp need.

my i8500 laptop is so fast, faster than my desktop also with 2.6ghz, p4.

desktop 1.5ghz with p4 and 256mb of ram.

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808 Posts

May 16th, 2004 12:00



@americajungle wrote:

i have 1GB of ram and that is  what i think xp need.


I have 1gb Ram also, it was fine with 512, but got a little greedy, and a nasty habit of running about 10 programs at the same time. So the extra 512 works great. I would concider 512 is min. But 1gig is better, I might upgrade to 2gig sometime in the future, if needed.

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261 Posts

May 20th, 2004 21:00

I'm not sure what it "needs", but I do know that it will use most of whatever you have, mainly for caches. I have 512 MB, and I run a lot of large Excel workbooks.
I have a Dell 8300 (new) and Win XP Pro. When I was using Win 98, I was always running out of GID resources (whatever that is), and I was using 256 MB initially, then 512 MB. The additional RAM definitely helps, but if you really want to speed thing up, I think you have to get a faster hard disk.
My 3ghz processor runs like crazy when I'm executing Excel macros, but slows to a snails pace whenever a macro does something that requires disk access.
No question of it, 512 MB is VERY desirable (but not necessary). As I sit here typing this, my monitor shows I have 213MB free, but it usually is around 170 MB. I have seen it as low as 37 MB free.
Another consideration is whether or not your video card is sharing RAM with the main computer. It's VERY desirable to have a video card with as much onboard RAM as you can afford.

2 Posts

May 31st, 2004 11:00

128 MEGS OF RAM IS MORE THEN ENOUGH FOR ANY APP. IF YOUR SYSTEM IS SLUGGISH TRY INCREASING YOUR PAGING FILE LIMITS. THAT WILL UTILIZE A SMALL PORTION OF YOUR HDD INSTEAD OF FORKING OUT CASH ITS SIMPLE EASY AND VIRTUALY LIMITLESS

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22 Posts

May 31st, 2004 18:00

Yes, this whole  memory  issue is analogous to the 'Does size does matter' controversy :)

639 Posts

June 1st, 2004 12:00

Hello-I would not run less than 256MB RAM with XP.  512MB for general apps like Microsoft Office, 1G for video and graphics applications. It does matter how much RAM you have.  

30 Posts

June 18th, 2004 23:00

JP,

   I can't even find paging file limits, can you tell me how to do this??

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