Dell Inspiron 600m query

[Firestrider]

My roommate wants to know if upgrading his RAM from 2x256mb to 1x1gb in his Dell Inspiron 600m laptop will show better performance in applications like Visual Studio 2005. When he resizes a background image it usually takes a long time to finish. His CPU usage is 99% and his available memory at that time is 60K. I told him that more RAM just allows you to run more processes / applications while faster RAM will give you better performance. But I don't know much about laptops, so can anyone give me insight on this, what can / should my roommate do to fix this problem?

Thanks.

[thideras]

If the cpu usage is at 99%, then it is the processor that is holding him back, not the RAM ;)

It is even more true that it is only taking 60kb of memory space, you would actually lose RAM performance going from the smaller to the larger since it isn't running in dual channel.

How to speed it up? Write the code better?

[Firestrider]

Thanks for the fast response.

I'm sorry his available physical memory (K) in the Windows Task Manager was 60,000, not the mem usage of the program.

The rated speed of his laptop is 1.8Ghz but when running idle in Cpu-Z the program says 600Mhz, and the multiplier changes when starting up programs to bump it up to 1.8Ghz. The processor is a Pentium M so I don't know if you can lock the CPU multiplier for 1.8Ghz, or will that change anything?

[thideras]

Thanks for the fast response.

I'm sorry his available physical memory (K) in the Windows Task Manager was 60,000, not the mem usage of the program.Ah, ok, but my answer still stands.

[Firestrider]

Is there any benefit to getting more RAM since hes under 100Mb available? I would like to know too since when I run a problem and get under 100Mb available RAM the program seems to crash.

[thideras]

Is there any benefit to getting more RAM since hes under 100Mb available? I would like to know too since when I run a problem and get under 100Mb available RAM the program seems to crash.Do you mean in 100mb available of actual RAM or virtual RAM? If it is the first, then no, it won't help until you start using ALL of the available RAM.