question about notebook ram

[wolterjwb]

I just purchased a new laptop and it has 2gb of ram at PC5300 DDR2 667MHz SDRAM. Toshiba said it would handle 2 Gb of DDR2 800 (PC2 6400). I was wondering if I would notice a difference between the two. The notebook is upgradeable to 4 Gb of ram so juust wondering whether to add more at 667MHz or splurge on the 800MHz. The entire specs of the laptop are as follows if that will help:

Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T7700 (2.4GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB), Genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate 32-Bit, Microsoft® Office® 2007 Basic Edition, 2048MB PC5300 DDR2 667MHz SDRAM (1024MBx2), 17.0" Diagonal Widescreen WSXGA+ TruBrite® display (1680x1050), ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 2600 with 256MB GDDR2 discrete memory + up to 255MB allocated shared graphics memory using ATI HyperMemory™ technology, 160GB HDD (5400rpm, Serial-ATA), 160GB 2nd HDD (5400rpm, Serial-ATA), DVD SuperMulti (+/-R double layer) drive, Intel® Wireless WiFi Link 4965 AGN (802.11a/g/n), Bluetooth® Version 2.0 +EDR, harman/kardon® stereo speakers,.

Thanks for help in advance.

Jimmy

[DMB2000uk]

Hello and welcome to the forums.

Games might see a 2-3 frame per second increase with the speed boost, and synthetic tests will show slight improvements, but you will not be able to feel the difference in regular day to day tasks.

Dan

[wolterjwb]

Thanks for the reply. The other thing I was wondering is whether it would matter if I upgraded to 4Gb (2 x 2Gb) instead of the 2 (2 x 1 Gb). Does it actually help in speeding up things. Just wondering b/c I hear how much of a power hog vista is.

Thanks,
Jimmy

[dicecca112]

not really like DMB said, the difference is not noticeable. Vista will use as much ram as you have no matter if you have 512mb or 8GB

[DMB2000uk]

If you multi-task and have a lot of applications open at once then you may see some benefit to having 4GB of RAM over 2GB.

You are right in that vista is a resource hog, but I'm unsure as to whether splashing out on all new RAM would be worth it.

If you are multi-tasking lots on your laptop have you noticed any extended periods of time where the system became sluggish and was reading/writing to the hard drive a lot?

If so this is called paging, what happens is when the RAM is filled up, the computer will swap out sections that aren't being used that moment into the hard drive. While this sounds fine, hard drives are several orders of magnitude slower at reading and writing from/to than RAM so the system will slow down as it has to wait for the hard drive to finish caching the files/programs that have just been paged.

If you haven't noticed any paging then there probably isn't any need for 4GB of RAM. Not wishing to install vista until SP1 (Even though I get a copy free via MSDNAA), I'm not sure as to just how much RAM it will typically use. Also I don't know how much more of a drain another 2GB of RAM would be on the battery life of the notebook.

Dan

[Groonx]

I agree with Dan, but I'd like to suggest a different way of looking at things.

How much is the money worth to you? If you are watching your budget, then you want cost-efficiency. But if the money is no big deal, then I would go for the RAM. Here's why:

The difference between "too much RAM" and "not enough RAM" is 2 years. You might as well put in the extra while you can easily get it, if you think you'd like to keep your notebook for a good length of time. Right now, this is not cost-efficient, but in a year or two your RAM will be only ho-hum.

Of course, notebooks might be reckoned as having a lifespan of only a few years anyway. You want to think about that too. But extra RAM will certainly be a factor in extending the effective life of your system. It always has been.

So, returning to my first point: what is the money worth to you?