Vista Goes Better With ...
Three gigs of RAM. Yes it does, yes it does.
I can be a bit penurious, depending on the circumstances. I drive a very reasonably priced car that has most everything I want/need that came in "tax, tag and title" as we say here in the South, in the teens (in the event you’re interested, it’s a Hyundai Tucson). The car before it lasted eleven years. My friends just shake their heads.
In my spendthrift defense, I can blow money on golf or a weekend trip and think nothing of it as it was something I wanted.
These two sides of my nature sometimes cause internal conflict. “I spent what on that? How *%^&*$) stupid am I?” Or to the point of the post, “Why in the world didn’t I spend the money to do it right?”
I bought two computers last year, a laptop for home and the road and a desktop for the office. Being my analytical self, I bought what I thought I needed and a bit more given that I keep things until they die.
(An aside that I’ve mentioned before: I dearly want my bedroom TV to expire so that I can rationalize buying an HD flat screen for the living room and put the 36 inch LCD in the bedroom. Sucker will not give up the ghost.)
Back to current programming. So when I bought the two computers they came with Vista. I don’t do a lot of heavy bit crunching. Word, WordPerfect, Excel, PowerPoint, IE7 (one to two or three windows), a couple PDF files, all at the same time as the day progresses). You get my point, they can be a drag on RAM when coupled with Vista’s hoggish nature. But I bought both with a gig of RAM. Things work, but can tend to lag.
Last night I surfed around to see if the lagging could be addressed by tweaking things in the computers. I ran some diagnostics and found no solution other than more RAM.
So I went to Best Buy today and the stars were with me (I know, I could have done better on line, but when I want something, I don’t want to wait, usually) they had a sale going on RAM. I got two – one gig sticks for just over fifty bucks. An hour and a half later (I’m a bit tentative when it comes to pulling things electric and electronic apart) they were resident and operative. VROOM! Happy, happy, happy.
So, I just explored the innards of my laptop and found that it only has two slots and will only take a total of two gigs of RAM. I want VROOM and am worried I won’t get the full experience with what the machine will take.
Anyone want two sticks of 512?
5 comments:
My laptop has Vista and 2 gb of RAM. It isn't "vroom" but it doesn't suck either.
Vista is supposed to be able to use the memory from a flash drive. Have you got a spare USB port you could plug an empty flash drive in to?
(Personally, I'm still on XP, and it will be the very last Microsoft product I buy. Next up will be either Mac or Linux.)
USB is a lot slower than RAM - has to do with access speeds. A flash drive won't give you "vroooom" speed. I don't think it's better than a swap file on a hard drive.
You guys are talking over my head. I thought flash drives were ROM rather than RAM?
My work machine has 160 gigs of hard drive and I have an external 200 gig drive that I save to each day.
What I've "understood" is that Vista has an algorithm that sends stuff that it thinks you may want soon into your your RAM, filling it up.
What ever the case is, three is better than one gig.
I'm going tomorrow to buy for the laptop. I have a bit more research to do. The laptop has only two slots and I'm reading that it has a maximum capacity of a gig per slot.
Even if that's the case, I should be ok as I usually only have IE7(one or two windows), Windows Mail and maybe a Word file or a PDF file.
There are probably enough excess 512MB memory sticks in the U.S. to pave a highway from Atlanta to Rochester. Perhaps you have a local "charity recycler" that would want them.
p.s. I have some, too.
p.p.s. 2GB is probably plenty for what you do. Forget the flash drive.
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