Memory Help Pages
1. Will buying more memory make a difference
to my computers performance?
Memory is one of the cheapest ways of dramatically improving
your systems performance since windows uses a lot of system
memory to store both running programs and data either in use
or that it expects to use.
For the average user there continues to be
a noticable gain in performance when you add memory up to
and including the point where your system has 128Mb of physical
memory in total.
The reason for this is that when windows runs
out of actual physical memory to use it uses what it calls
a swap file which is space on the hard drive instead and just
"pretends" that it is memory. The only problem with this is
that the time taken to access the hard drive rather than actual
memory is up to 1000 times slower. Now adding more memory
will not make your computer 1000 times faster because the
time to access the data is only part of the total time taken
to accomplish any given task, but obviously it will speed
up that part of the operation and therefore the total time
taken will fall too.
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