TR Forums

How much of a performance increase can you expect jumping from 2 GB to 4 GB of RAM? What kind of applications will see the most benefit? Currently I'm running Vista 32 bit, so I know I wouldnt see all of the RAM, but how much of a difference does that make?

Getting more ram wont help you much unless your OS can take advantage of it. An OS like Linux will use up your free ram slowly to speed up i/o operations for frequently used pages. Windows can do the same. Generally however you have to set it in your advanced system memory configuration. For Windows XP you can go to system properties -> advanced -> performance -> advanced. Set memory usage to system cache. Windows Vista is more advanced and usually it's superfetcher does something similar on top of the normal pre-fetching operations. More memory is always good, as long as your OS can see it.

Most likely you will see no performance improvement. For one, you'll probably see about 3GB of RAM that your OS will utilize. I run 2GB of ram and rarely (if ever) use more than 75% of it. 4GB is nice for future proofing, but I doubt you'll utilize it now.

It depends on what you are doing. Even on a 32-bit system going from 2GiB to ~3.2GiB can represent a significant improvement if you have enough open applications that take up more than the physical 2GiB. Even if you have one application open, but if that application takes up all of 2GiB (games and apps like Photoshop), the "extra" RAM is still useful for other background processes or general OS buffers. You have to measure and profile your usage to see if you are running out of RAM. Task Manager/Process Explorer and/or Perfmon can be used.

I have 8gb, and I need every bit of it.. I use a little program called VMWare

I would greatly reccomend it if you enjoy multitasking with needy programs, such as graphics design, or maybe if you like to play games, heavy games, while working.

like others have said, you probably won't see much (if any) difference now. if it's ddr2 or 3, it may well be worth getting anyway, since you'ld probably be able to use it in your next system. i think johntp hit it; it's good for future-proofing. here is an article from corsair that examines 2 gb vs 4 gb. there are some gains, but it's coming from a memory company so i'd take it with a grain or two of salt.