A Question of Comp. tech

**Ivramire** · 05-23-2010, 05:30 PM

I'd appreciate an answer from anyone who could answer rather quickly. I helped someone in a position to help me rather recently and now that person is offering to install a lot more RAM to my laptop (rather random but yeah...)

I currently run 1014MB of RAM on a Toshiba Satellite A200 (gift from a benefactor) with a dual-core processor, which dxdiag tells me is T2450 @ 2Ghz (2 CPUs), ~2.0 Ghz on a Vista Home Basic system. The person's tech department says that he can add up to 2GB of RAM on each core (RAM of 5GB?) and I was just wondering of this is practical for my laptop.

Can I even use that much RAM? What would happen if I upgraded only RAM and left my processor and video card (251Mb, Intel 945 Express Integrated Chipset T__T) the same? Would I eventually have to get a new laptop anyway?

**Belaslav** · 05-23-2010, 06:05 PM

Ram is not what you might call a "vital" piece of hardware for performance. For a 32 bit system the max ram you can use is 4 Gb. I have a dual core myself and the 3 Gb of ram preinstalled suited all of my needs so far. So an extra ram stick won't hurt, but you won't see any significant improvements.

**Andromeda** · 05-23-2010, 10:25 PM

You dont actually add the memory to each core itself rather they all feed of the same memory. A 32 Bit OS can not use more than 4GB of RAM this includes the RAM in your video card so in your case you would only be able to have 3749MB of ram total rest of the RAM will just be unused and go to waste so its probably better to use 2 sticks of 1GB of RAM and 1 stick of 512k if your motherboard allows it.

Gaming computers wont need any more than 6GB any extra is pushing it.

For virtual machine and photoshop users 8-12GB of Ram is better.

**Triumph** · 05-23-2010, 10:42 PM

I would say 8GB is the practical limit for anyone, really. The extra expense does not justify the gain beyond 8. I personally run 4.

You can run CAD software with 2GB. 2 should be your minimum, and 8 should be your maximum. From what I gather, there is very little noteworthy improvement from 6GB DDR3 to 12GB, so 8 is technically overkill already.

**Ivramire** · 05-24-2010, 03:28 AM

Ok good, guess I'll tell them to make it 4GB total.

Thanks for the replies.

**Phantom Badger** · 05-24-2010, 06:37 AM

Apparantly I only have 2GB of Ram (although assloads of Memory space, like 232GB) and mine seems to work fine on high demand games such as TF2 and Runes of Magic.

**Sparkeh** · 05-25-2010, 07:08 PM

I think 2GB is enough. o-o

**Andromeda** · 05-25-2010, 10:16 PM

Originally Posted by Sparkeh

I think 2GB is enough. o-o

For me it isnt I only have Winamp, Fire Fox, MSN anda folder open I can very easily hit 2GB if I have a few firefox tabs open with preloaded stuff from youtube.

**Sparkeh** · 05-26-2010, 12:21 PM

Yeah, I was wrong. :/