How much RAM

[lazyitus]

My computer is a 4 year old tiny bag'o crap - How do I find out how much RAM it has ?

Is it 'My Computer' and then 'Local Disk C' revealing 32.5GB free.

IS THIS THE RAM ?

And if so, is it enough to enable Windows XP to operate properly?

>> Edited by lazyitus on Thursday 29th December 16:11

[TeamD]

lazyitus said:

My computer is a 4 year old tiny bag'o crap - How do I find out how much RAM it has ?

Comiserations (sp?)

lazyitus said:

Is it 'My Computer' and then 'Local Disk C' revealing 32.5GB free. IS THIS THE RAM ?

No, that's the disk space.


Try right click of 'My Computer' and then select 'Properties' from the popup menu. It should display a dialogue box with the 'General' tab visible, somewhere on this should be the memory size.

[GreenV8S]

My Computer, right click to show Properties, RAM is listed at the bottom.

[lazyitus]

Cheers Guys.

[UncleDave]

YHM mate

[scared but happy]

GreenV8S said:

My Computer, right click to show Properties, RAM is listed at the bottom.

Or Start->Run->Dxdiag. Handy for giving video graphics memory as well

[Chumpers]

Hi

You need more than just RAM to make XP work happily. I wouldn't run XP on anything below a P3 with 512Mb of RAM. It will run on slower boxes but you may be waiting for some time :-)

When you install XP try and format your hard disk or partition first if you can as this makes for a cleaner install. If this is more than you want to carry out on your own I'd get someone to do it for you on the PC. Upgrading an operating system is not too difficult but sorting the drivers and other bits and piece out can take some time if it is new to you. Do you have a 2nd PC? When I rebuild a PC I try and have another working system next to it to pull drivers or other goodies from the internet. You can rebuild a PC without a 2nd box but it is easier not to :-)

Cheers

[lake]

Chumpers said:

Hi You need more than just RAM to make XP work happily. I wouldn't run XP on anything below a P3 with 512Mb of RAM. It will run on slower boxes but you may be waiting for some time :-) When you install XP try and format your hard disk or partition first if you can as this makes for a cleaner install. If this is more than you want to carry out on your own I'd get someone to do it for you on the PC. Upgrading an operating system is not too difficult but sorting the drivers and other bits and piece out can take some time if it is new to you. Do you have a 2nd PC? When I rebuild a PC I try and have another working system next to it to pull drivers or other goodies from the internet. You can rebuild a PC without a 2nd box but it is easier not to :-) Cheers

And if you do format the drive first, backup all your files you want to keep first, because once the format has completed nothing will be left on the hard drive. In fact backup your system anyway.

Lake

[lazyitus]

Many thanks for all the info.

I've learnt alot in the last 24 hours.

[leosayer]

While we're on this subject - how do I determine how much RAM my pc is using (on xp home).

I look at the stats on task manager and it never seems to go above 400mb. Is this right - perhaps the 768mb I've got installed is overkill.

[Chumpers]

You may well go above 768MB occasionally and if you start paging to hard disk it really hurts system performance. If you start playing with audio, video or graphics you will easily go above 768MB. Generally the more RAM the better (generally as I'm thinking of the early PC ATX mobos that only cached 64Mb of RAM in case you are wondering).

Profiling a system's RAM requirements is difficult on PC based systems. RAM usage changes nearly instantaneously and so you are only really seeing an average RAM amount you use on your system, not the actual use.

Modern multi-tasking operating systems (*IX, Windows NT/2k/2k3/XP etc) can use 'spare' RAM to cache hard disk contents too. If you clean boot your system and then start Word, for example, you will find Word takes a few seconds to load. If you close Word down and re-open you will see it opens very quickly. This is because Windows does not unload Word from Memory when you close the program. If there is enough spare RAM available it will keep Word in RAM, ready for its next use. If you leave your PC on for a while and profile it you will see all the RAM is used, mainly for this purpose.

If you are limited in RAM it can be helpful to move the swap file to the fastest hard disk in your system, or even stripe the swapfile. However this is overkill for home use so I will put my anorak away and shut up :-)

HTH

Chumpers