{"id":302,"date":"2007-07-05T23:00:21","date_gmt":"2007-07-06T04:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2007\/07\/05\/efficiency-tip-72-more-ram\/"},"modified":"2015-05-14T09:12:53","modified_gmt":"2015-05-14T14:12:53","slug":"efficiency-tip-72-more-ram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2007\/07\/05\/efficiency-tip-72-more-ram\/","title":{"rendered":"Efficiency Tip #72 – More RAM"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you are running Windows XP, you need 1 GB of RAM.\u00a0 If you have Vista, double it to 2 GB.\u00a0 To find out how much memory your computer has, press Shift-Ctrl-ESC<\/a>.\u00a0 Click the Performance tab and check the value at the bottom for Physical Memory.\u00a0 The “Total” is the number you need to find.\u00a0 Mine says<\/p>\n

Total: 2095196k<\/p>\n

which translates to 2 GB.\u00a0 You can run with less memory than I recommend.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Right now I have\u00a0a dozen\u00a0programs running, which is typical for me.\u00a0 I have Firefox and IE running with three windows of each (I don’t use tabs – some please tell me one benefit of tabs).\u00a0 My email is running plus all these things: RSS Reader, Paintshop Pro, AVG Anti-Virus, Hamachi, Skype, iPodder, Roboform, allSnap, Picasa and GoogleDesktop.\u00a0 On top of that, my machine also runs Apache so I can test all my web apps without uploading them to my server.<\/p>\n

You may not have this much running on your computer.\u00a0 This box runs XP.\u00a0 Its memory usage hovers right at 1 GB.\u00a0 Because I have so many things going all the time, I have 2 GB of RAM.\u00a0 It never slows down to copy information to a “swap” file on the hard drive.\u00a0 That is what happens if you fill up your computer’s memory.\u00a0 The operating system\u00a0analyzes the\u00a0programs in memory and removes items that aren’t active at the moment to make room for new processes.\u00a0 As soon as the hard drive becomes involved in any process, things slow down.\u00a0 The hard drive is mechanical.\u00a0 It moves thousands of times slower than the electronic components can handle.<\/p>\n

Having enough RAM to run all the programs you use will save you time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It cost me $100 to add that second gigabyte of RAM.\u00a0 It was well worth it.<\/p>\n

TSPY=2.91<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you are running Windows XP, you need 1 GB of RAM.\u00a0 If you have Vista, double it to 2 GB.\u00a0 To find out how much memory your computer has, press Shift-Ctrl-ESC.\u00a0 Click the Performance tab and check the value … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[336,338],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edtech","category-efficiency","tag-edtech","tag-efficiency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1443,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions\/1443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}