2GB vs 4GB in Vista

I recently had trouble with my current 2GB of Teamgroup memory, so I bought new 2GB of ram to replace it from Newegg. When the new ram came I realized it was just not seating correctly rather than broken, so this leaves me with 4GB of ram... I can't decide if I want to return the 2GB for refund and eat the restocking fee and return shipping (blah) or if I keep the ram because of better performance in the future.

I honestly can't see much difference in XP. I do a lot of photo editing with huge files, photoshop and lightroom often use up over 700MB of space each. The difference between 1 GB and 2GB was night and day but 2GB to 4GB is hard to see.

I'm planning on a vista upgrade come late summer, will I notice the ram then?

You might in Vista but I really don't know. From what I've been reading about Vista it likes ram. Everytime MS releases another os it always likes more ram.

Keep in mind that Vista 32-bit will not be able to take advantage of all 4GB, even with PAE enabled. If you wish to use the full 4GB with Vista, you'll need the 64-bit version.

If I remember correctly, although XP can see up to 4GB of ram, programs can only use 2GB maximum. This would mean that although you wont be getting much of a performance increase in Photoshop, XP will be using your swap file much less because of the additional ram availalble for anything else currently being held in ram. Less swapping, smoother performance.

You could also play around with a ram disk or a better disk cache with 1GB of ram, and just leave 3GB available for XP and programs. This is what I plan to do with my new system, since I dont plan on upgrading to Vista anytime soon. I may even go ahead with 2GB of disk cache, and just 2GB of ram available for the system. So far with my current 3GB, things dont seem much different with a 1GB cache, although the swap file is finally seeing some use. I'll have to do more testing on a clean install to see if it really does make a difference, but thats just some ideas for you to think about.

My dad has 4GB in his 64-bit Vista rig and he tells me constantly about how he loves it vs 2GB. He doesn't do any photoshop stuff but he does plenty of other things with pictures.

I think inkfx has the correct answer---From what I have read, Vista has a feature called superfetch that will toss frequently used programs into ram for super fast access. And over time the OS learns your habits. Which will reduce hard disk access when you load the program in favor of way faster ram.---assuming you don't load immediately after you start Vista which does not then give superfetch enough time to load up your ram in system idle periods.

So unlike XP, Vista will use all the ram it can get---although I am not sure if 32 bit Vista may have an upper ram limit.

Like many--I will wait for awhile before even considering Vista.

But for the OP, the 2 vs. 4 gig question may have another dimension. Namely, can all 4 gigs run as fast as just 2 gigs alone without slowing down the memory bus?---on some mobos---populating all four slots causes the memory bus to slow down some.

32-bit Vista has the same memory limit as Windows XP, 3.25GB.

My pc came with vista so how do I know if I got a 32 bit version or a 64 bit version?

Luckily changing from 2 to 4 GB did not change my maximum overclock so it runs at the same speed. I guess 4GB sounds like the consensus.

You guys should read-up on Vista's "ReadyBoost". It's really saved my butt when I upgraded to Vista as I work from home. Before I inserted my 8GB Compact Flash card to use with ReadyBoost, Vista was un-barable - could not work from home. Always swapping memory w/HDD as my system would boot up "idle" at 640 MB, leaving only 1.3 GB to the OS and Apps.

Yes, not as fast as my overclocked Mushkins' at 1080mhz for my 4.2 Ghz DualCore. But dear lord, I can work again now with (looking at what I have open right now): four Visual Studio 2005, SQL 2005 Server (db I am working on is 3.4 GB in size, Workgroup Edition), Photoshop CS2 with an image of 7 MB in size and 13 small "cut-up" images I'm working with.

As well as Outlook connected to Exchange, Live Messenger, Trillian, WMP streaming Massive Attack, and other misc background apps.

For gaming, I of course shut everything down and disable services so I can load BF2142 - which uses 1.2 GB of ram at 1600x12800. But for everything else, there's no need for me to upgrade to 4 GB now after enabling ReadyBoost.

I am seriously surprised at Microsoft's technology behind it. Bottomline? I now have 10 GB of memory. Anyone else?

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx

Note: I am using SandDisk's CompactFlash card reader with an Ultra HighSpeed 8 GB CompactFlash card I use for my Canon XTi. I remove it and format it in the camera when I want to use the Camera. I insert it back into the PC when I want it for the PC. So ignore any "Can't use card readers with ReadyBoost" - that's BS.

Check this out

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6167115/index.html

eduncan911 said:

I am seriously surprised at Microsoft's technology behind it. Bottomline? I now have 10 GB of memory. Anyone else?

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx

Click to expand...

No, you don't have 10GB of memory. Not even effectively. From a previous post of yours, I can tell that you're misunderstanding ReadyBoost. First, a couple of points from the article you linked:

Q: Why can't I use more than 4GB of flash?
A: The FAT32 filesystem limits our ReadyBoost.sfcache file to 4GB

Q: Isn't this just putting the paging file onto a flash disk?
A: Not really - the file is still backed on disk. This is a cache - if the data is not found in the ReadyBoost cache, we fall back to the HDD.

So, the maximum amount of flash which can be used by ReadyBoost is 4GB. ReadyBoost is not a replacement for RAM, nor does it act like RAM. In simplest terms, ReadyBoost uses the SuperFetch algorithm - the same algorithm used to populate sytem memory with a cache of sorts - to cache portions of the paging file. Instead of hitting the disk every time a cache miss occurs in system memory, pages are brought in from the Readyboost device, which is a much faster read. When unused or forced out pages are written out, they're written to the Readyboost device and then to the HDD, allowing the OS to perform a fast reclamation of system memory pages and write those pages to the HDD later (and maybe not right away, depending on what the algorithm determines).

I have no doubt you are experiencing significant performance gains with Readyboost. But the assertion which is echoed all over is that Readyboost is like "adding more RAM!". That's just not the case.

You are correct, though - pretty much any device which can be seen by windows as a disk (including flash-based iPod shuffles and Nanos) can be used as a Readyboost device.