Efficiency Tip #72 – More RAM

If you are running Windows XP, you need 1 GB of RAM.  If you have Vista, double it to 2 GB.  To find out how much memory your computer has, press Shift-Ctrl-ESC.  Click the Performance tab and check the value at the bottom for Physical Memory.  The “Total” is the number you need to find.  Mine says

Total: 2095196k

which translates to 2 GB.  You can run with less memory than I recommend.  If you have several applications (browser, email, photo program, Skype, etc) running at the same time, your computer will bog down if you don’t have enough RAM.  Right now I have a dozen programs running, which is typical for me.  I have Firefox and IE running with three windows of each (I don’t use tabs – some please tell me one benefit of tabs).  My email is running plus all these things: RSS Reader, Paintshop Pro, AVG Anti-Virus, Hamachi, Skype, iPodder, Roboform, allSnap, Picasa and GoogleDesktop.  On top of that, my machine also runs Apache so I can test all my web apps without uploading them to my server.

You may not have this much running on your computer.  This box runs XP.  Its memory usage hovers right at 1 GB.  Because I have so many things going all the time, I have 2 GB of RAM.  It never slows down to copy information to a “swap” file on the hard drive.  That is what happens if you fill up your computer’s memory.  The operating system analyzes the programs in memory and removes items that aren’t active at the moment to make room for new processes.  As soon as the hard drive becomes involved in any process, things slow down.  The hard drive is mechanical.  It moves thousands of times slower than the electronic components can handle.

Having enough RAM to run all the programs you use will save you time.  When I went from 1 GB to 2 GB in this machine, I found myself waiting noticeably less time for almost all my normal processes.  It cost me $100 to add that second gigabyte of RAM.  It was well worth it.

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