Should I get more ram?

[DeezNtz]

Right now I am running Win 98 SE on a MSI K7T Pro with a Duron 700 and 128 MB of PC-133 Ram. From my local computer shop I can get a Micron 128MB PC-133 Cas 2 stick of Ram for only $53. My question is how much of a performance gain will there be going from 128 to 256? I think I'm going to buy the ram regardless since it is so cheap but I just wanted to hear your opinions first. Thanks in advance. Oh yeah, I remeber when I bought my original 128 MB PC-133 stick last summer. And it cost me $155 at the time!

 

[Killbat]

You should see a boost if you do anything "big", like serious graphics/video/audio work. Otherwise it'll just be a tad less HDD access.

 

[sharkeeper]

IMHO, you can never have too much ram!

Cheers!

 

[JellyBaby]

Go to 256 MB. Then add the conservative swap file INI tweak, reboot and enjoy little to no disk paging, snappy application launches and closes and better performance in some memory hungry games.

 

[DeezNtz]

Jelly Baby: What is the conservative swap file INI tweak? Do I have to alter an INI file manually? Or are you talking about setting the virtual memory to a fixed size in the system properties in the control panel?

 

[Wuming]

you should be able to see quite a great performance increase going from 128 mb to 256 mb like i did. yup, add the ConservativeSwapFileUsage = 1 in the 386Enh section in your system.ini, and also let windows anage your swap file size.

 

[lazyboy]

Sometimes have 2 sticks of RAM causes problems. I think it was responsible for some of my problems. SO I guess I'm going to sell both sticks of RAM and buy a 256 DIMM or something.

 

[DeezNtz]

Yeah, I read that alot about people having trouble with 2 sticks but I think I'll be okay since the second stick of Ram I'm getting is the same one as my first one.

Wuming: You say to let Windows manage the swap file. Why? I generally see around that you should set the min and max swap file size to some fixed size, like twice the amount of Ram that you have.

 

[DeezNtz]

bump

 

[Jeff H]

The flip side of going from two 128MB sticks to one 256MB stick is some older boards (such as my BH6) don't take well to 256MB sticks. DeezNtz, I did just what you're contemplating. I added another 128MB stick to my BH6 rev1.02 board, and especially at the price these things are going for these days, I don't at all regret it.

In fact, I just bought another 128MB stick and put it away in a drawer, anticipating that I'll be building a machine next year for my college-bound daughter. She'll get my BH6/iP!!!-650 and I'm going to a KT133A/Duron/TBird setup, w/ my two 128MB PC133 sticks.

 

[Guilty]

If you use a static swap file with Conservative swapping, windows will still find a way to use the swap. So set it to conservative and let windows manage it, since you probably wont need swap anyway. Also, I recommend you download Cacheman and set a static vcache of 20-32MB's with a small chunk size and reasonable file caching. Using a static vcache can really help high memory systems so windows doesnt expand the size to an absurd amount, and setting the minimum to the same as maximum, you save the system from constantly calculating what it can do with data in that min/max zone.

 

[DeezNtz]

Thanks everyone, now I'm definitely going to go buy that ram tomorrow. Plus it will definitely come in handy when I upgrade my OS in the future. Win 2000 already needs 256 MB to run comfortably so Whistler should require the same or even more.

 

[TravisBickle]

what do you mean? I am running win2k on 60Mb!

 

[DeezNtz]

And I'm sure if you upgraded your system with a 128MB stick that you would definitely see a performance boost.

 

[JellyBaby]

<< Jelly Baby: What is the conservative swap file INI tweak? >>

DeezNtz, as others have said place the line &quot;ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1&quot; anywhere in the &quot;[386Enh]&quot; section of your &quot;SYSTEM.INI&quot; file. Then let Windows 98 handle virtual memory (it will seldom use the swap file anyway with 256 MB of ram). Cacheman is optional but I do use it. My settings:

vcache min - 16384
vcache max - 16384
chunk size - 512
name cache - 2048
dir. cache - 64

This works well for how *I* use my machine. Your results may differ. Offer void where prohibited, etc.

 

[chuckieland]

why not, another 128 stick cost like 50buck for pc133

 

[Charles]

256MB should be sufficient.

 

[sharkeeper]

Setting a small, static VCACHE is NOT very good!!!

You add RAM to speed up the slowest part of your computer: the disk!!!

I find that Windows 9x VCACHE will grow too large to cause swapping. I limit it to all my memory minus what I think is reasonable for the OS; typically 64 MB. One exception is machines with >511 MB of RAM. Of course, if you have that much memory you should be using NT, but that is another thing altogether. If you have >511 MB of RAM (say 768 MB, for example) you MUST limit the MAXFILECACHE to 511 MB (523264) or lower or MS DOS programs won't run. Ironically, if you open a MS DOS Prompt with more than 511 in VCACHE upper limit, you get a message &quot;Program too big to fit in memory&quot;! Damn Bill and his humor.

If you have lots of FREE MEMORY it isn't put to use very well! A well optimised system will have most of its memory in disk cache after a while. This means programs open at lightning speed and game levels load as fast as possible.

However, if you edit large images in PS, obviously it would be preferrable to have the VCACHE MAXFILECACHE variable considerably lower, say 1/4 of your system memory.

Cheers!

 

[Mustanggt]

You will never know your running 256 from 128 at least I noticed no real world speed.

 

[aniki]

what about going from 192-256 or 320 megs

 

[JellyBaby]

<< what about going from 192-256 or 320 megs >>

Only for one purpose: to run Ultima Ascension at a decent framerate (and actually I think you need 512 for that).