Would extra ram help?

I have an intel core2duo e5400 with 4gb ram running win7 home premium x64. It's an always-on machine, and I've noticed that if I, for example, go to open chrome from the taskbar (running in the background) the hard drive grinds like anything for a few minutes before I'm actually able to go ahead and use chrome. My ram usage is always above 70%, and I realize that multiple apps would be reducing performance. Just wondering, would adding another 2 or 4gb of ram improve my being able to run multiple apps and being able to switch quickly between them, even though they've been running without being used for a while?

Solid State Drive for your Windows partition may be a good idea. Make sure you get a good one.


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rommie said:

Ithe hard drive grinds like anything for a few minutes before I'm actually able to go ahead and use chrome.

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What do you mean grind? Does it actually make noise? If so your drive may be faulty.

cout<<"Dracula" said:

What do you mean grind? Does it actually make noise? If so your drive may be faulty.

Click to expand...

To add onto this question and assuming your hard drive is ok, how are you at 70% memory load with 4gb? Can you close background processes? You are starting to get close to filling up your RAM, so Windows is going to push applications to swap, which is going to "grind" the hard drive a substantial amount.

rommie said:

My ram usage is always above 70%, and I realize that multiple apps would be reducing performance. Just wondering, would adding another 2 or 4gb of ram improve my being able to run multiple apps and being able to switch quickly between them, even though they've been running without being used for a while?

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To answer part of your question, relating directly to RAM...

I too have an "always-on machine" (mostly), and after about a week, closing all apps still doesn't free up all the ram that was used by any programs.

Long and short, if you are using 70%+ of your RAM, then I would definitely suggest adding even 2GB or more. If you can, 4 GB would help greatly too. Not only would it allow you to have more programs open all the time, it gives the OS more room to cache things that are frequently used.

Add more ram if possible.

I think that if you can invest a tad bit more money ($60), you can get an expotential increase in speed if you go with a SSD instead of getting more RAM. 4GB is perfectly fine for what you do. An SSD is night and day difference.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227728

I too have an "always-on machine" (mostly), and after about a week, closing all apps still doesn't free up all the ram that was used by any programs.

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This is...not normal? Windows does not operate that way...OS X does, because for some reason, when you click the Red "X" button, it doesn't really QUIT the program....it just semi-permanently minimizes it....

EpicMango said:

I think that if you can invest a tad bit more money ($60), you can get an expotential increase in speed if you go with a SSD instead of getting more RAM. 4GB is perfectly fine for what you do. An SSD is night and day difference.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226168



This is...not normal? Windows does not operate that way...OS X does, because for some reason, when you click the Red "X" button, it doesn't really QUIT the program....it just semi-permanently minimizes it....

Click to expand...

As for the SSD, I agree, but was merely just answering the part about Ram, only because I have not experienced the awesomeness of an SSD

On the other hand, with my situation, I usually leave my laptop running 24/7 but at night, I close down anything that I am not going to leave running all night (Like Chrome, Firefox, Word, etc...) and frequently I will close every program that I've opened, and the ram usage is about a gig higher than when it was fresh from a reboot.

I'm not really worried about it, because I usually reboot once a week, but it's something that I've noticed. :/