I realise that this might be a "Bar" subject but I know some of you use XP. Following repeated crashes I concluded memory was the first thing to check. As a result I can say that my XP machine runs far better with 1 gig of memory than it ever has with 256 meg!

With current memory prices this may be the most cost effective upgrade you can make at present.

Thanks for your recommendation.

I agree, however I also think it depends on the kind of processing you do with your computer. In a multitask environment the RAM memory is very important since it will begin to slow down the computer drastically when the RAM memory is exceeded. That's why a fast hard drive is so important, because when the memory starts swapping on the disk the difference in performance is huge between a slow and a fast disk. I recommend hard drives with native command queuing to speed up the multithread processing in the OS.

Generally I think the best way of having a fast computer is to constantly upgrade the harddrive to a larger and faster one when a certain % (e.g.40%) of the hard drive space is full and upgrade the CPU and memory when the upgrading of the hard drive is not helping enough anymore. In this way you don't need to upgrade the CPU and memory so often and you save a lot of bucks.

Best regards,
YamahaAndy

More than the full drive concept, I suggest you check your running applications. I upgraded my laptop memory from 256 to 1 gig and my hard drive from 40 to 40 gig. I didn't see any noticeable improvement in speed or performance until I reloaded the new HD only with the programs I needed to use. I saved all the old, non-essential programs to the old HD and made sure only the essential programs were booting up at START. Now my speed and effeciency are top notch.

Because a messed up registry makes it slow the available hard drive space is essential. When uninstalling programs under Windows XP it's important to do it in the add/remove programs dialog and never delete any uninstall files.

If the program is used for many purposes it's very important to clean up the computer from spyware regularly since spyware can slow down the computer drastically.

You can also do indirect things to make it faster like removing unnecassary programs from the startup sequence. The reason why this is so important is not for the memory allocation, it's because of the disk activity! With less memory available on the disk, low disk speed and high disc activity, the system slows down drastically!

I still want to tell you that performance is best managed with the focus on hard drives.

Adding more RAM has been the solution since Windows 3.x were introduced.
There is always a "sweet spot" on the amount of memory in a PC, depending on the OS used, when the perfofmance gain is huge.
For win 98 it was around 96 MB, when upgrading to 128 the difference was noticeable without resorting to benchmark programs.
For XP, the sweet spot is probably around 384 MB, after that you can feel the difference.
As for the hard disk, the faster the better, but I don't think that a faster hard disk will "speed up" a system. HD speed is orders of magnitude lower than RAM, and the speed increase or decrease is not that noticeable. The key is to have enough RAM to avoid constant HD swapping.

In other words, give it loads of RAM, you won't regret it.

If not, it would have been a kind of strange.

I can't understand why they even sell PC's with XP as OS, even the
Home version, without min. 512MB RAM as standard.
Some say that more is not always better, but in this case I would
say it certainly is.
GJ

"If not, it would have been a kind of strange"

That's very true!

Certainly there's less disc thrashing going on; mines a 60GB Samsung thats about half full. I don't multitask very much either.

I was just suprised by how much "smoother" everything feels. Totally subjective, I'm sure!

To clarify; the "smoother" feeling is subjective.

The performance gain is concrete; everything is happening about twice as fast as before.

Yes, and the main reason for it is that when you have
memory (RAM) enough, the OS don't have to write to the
HD for use as memory (cache) all the time.
GJ

As I already mentioned, it depends on the processing type. If you run several programs that analyzes a lot of stuff in the memory all the time, the memory speed and size (+bus) and CPU is deciding the speed the most. However, it's very usual in music to record and playback things at the same time when you run different real-time effects in the memory in a multithreaded environment. What happens now is that if the disk read and write access time is slow it doesn't matter how much you have in memory and how large it is since what you have in memory is dependent on the data coming from the disks when the CPU is processing it all. You might see a fast user interface because of the high RAM memory, but the result might be high latency and clipping in the sound.

It is true that swapping on the disks is a huge performance eater, but when you start recording many channels at once and run real-time effects on them you will notice a lot of swapping even though you have much RAM. This is very noticable if you record on a slow hard drive with little available disk space left.

The computer is always as fast as the slowest part of it, that is currently the hard drive. Once again, in music playback and recording is so essential that it basically is a matter of how fast the computer gets and sets data on the disk that decides the computers performance in such an environment. The reason why it is so important is because several processes need to access different things on the disk at the same time. So the more tracks you run the more it affects the performance negatively if the disk is slow, even though you might have much RAM memory. To solve this you need 2 things: intelligent data access and fast disk mechanisms built in it.