Ram/Memory
#1
10-17-09, 09:54 AM
Ram/Memory
Newbie here. I bought a home built tower with windows XP, from a guy i worked with, he will install the 1 GB ram, i ordered (right now it has 485MB of ram) my question is what dos more ram do for the computer, make it start up faster, because mine takes to long, to start up (about 2-3 min. to connect to the broadband ISP)
I see the newer ones have 2 to 3 GB of ram, so i figured 1.5 is better than .5 for me
help
I see the newer ones have 2 to 3 GB of ram, so i figured 1.5 is better than .5 for me
help
#2
10-17-09, 10:32 AM
factors at play
It depends on what services and what programs start up from the start.
A fresh clean stripped down copy of XP installed is quick, one from a major like HP or Dell is not, due to all the service and programs they have starting at boot time. 1.5gb is not bad for XP, 2 Gb is the sweet spot. The other factor will be hard drive size and free space and hard drive rpm, and weather they are SATA or a PATA drive.
All my computer have XP, and are installed stripped with non essential services turned off, bare needed drivers installed and no unnecessary programs running at boot time.
As you add software to a newly installed system, some will install small bits of software or services to run at boot ( MS Office installs ff.exe for example which is a indexing service to search for files faster by pre caching them every time you boot, this can be turned off ), and most of the time such programs are optional or can be set to manual instead of automatic at boot.
A fresh clean stripped down copy of XP installed is quick, one from a major like HP or Dell is not, due to all the service and programs they have starting at boot time. 1.5gb is not bad for XP, 2 Gb is the sweet spot. The other factor will be hard drive size and free space and hard drive rpm, and weather they are SATA or a PATA drive.
All my computer have XP, and are installed stripped with non essential services turned off, bare needed drivers installed and no unnecessary programs running at boot time.
As you add software to a newly installed system, some will install small bits of software or services to run at boot ( MS Office installs ff.exe for example which is a indexing service to search for files faster by pre caching them every time you boot, this can be turned off ), and most of the time such programs are optional or can be set to manual instead of automatic at boot.
#3
10-17-09, 05:26 PM
Group Moderator
I wouldn't expect a lightning-fast bootup by adding memory. I'm running an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6700 @ 2.66GHz with 3gb of RAM and it takes a couple of minutes to load everything up and be ready to rock. 
#4
10-18-09, 04:14 AM
"A fresh clean stripped down copy of XP installed is quick"
Very true!! My old hardrive got corrupted and my son's friend couldn't fix it so they installed a new [to me] hardrive while saving my files. Because a lot of unused programs were deleted, my pc starts a lot faster.... and I'm maxed out @ 1 gb of ram.
Very true!! My old hardrive got corrupted and my son's friend couldn't fix it so they installed a new [to me] hardrive while saving my files. Because a lot of unused programs were deleted, my pc starts a lot faster.... and I'm maxed out @ 1 gb of ram.
#6
10-18-09, 03:01 PM
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More RAM sure helped my tower to boot faster. I was running 128MB (original) with XP Pro and it seemed to take forever to boot up, at least three or four minutes and maybe longer. After adding a single 1GB module (left the original 128MB and still have two open slots) it now boots up in about a minute.
Something else I've noticed is that before it was consistently reading/writing to the hard drive and now it almost never does that except under order.
My laptop. on the other hand, which had 512MB, has shown no improvement in boot time with an additional 1GB of RAM.
Something else I've noticed is that before it was consistently reading/writing to the hard drive and now it almost never does that except under order.
My laptop. on the other hand, which had 512MB, has shown no improvement in boot time with an additional 1GB of RAM.
#7
10-18-09, 04:58 PM
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If you want to cut off a some load time.
1. You can go to bios and have it
A. Turn off extended diagnostics so your computer will not check on your hardware every time it is turned on.
B. Change boot order so that it boots from hard-drive first. (you will have to remember this if in the future you upgrade the OS)
2. Cut all start-up services except the bare minimum.
It is complicated to tell you if the memory you are going to install will help with the boot up or not.
Let me explain:
The ram, motherboard, HDD, CPU, GPU all do things together. Since they rely on each other and you have not told us details then it is impossible for us to answer your question. The weakest link of these components (sometimes excluding GPU) sets your speed, because it will slow down the rest of the components. This is called bottle necking. In order to find out which should be upgraded the most then you need to know which one is slowing the computer down the most.
1. You can go to bios and have it
A. Turn off extended diagnostics so your computer will not check on your hardware every time it is turned on.
B. Change boot order so that it boots from hard-drive first. (you will have to remember this if in the future you upgrade the OS)
2. Cut all start-up services except the bare minimum.
It is complicated to tell you if the memory you are going to install will help with the boot up or not.
Let me explain:
The ram, motherboard, HDD, CPU, GPU all do things together. Since they rely on each other and you have not told us details then it is impossible for us to answer your question. The weakest link of these components (sometimes excluding GPU) sets your speed, because it will slow down the rest of the components. This is called bottle necking. In order to find out which should be upgraded the most then you need to know which one is slowing the computer down the most.
#8
10-20-09, 01:01 PM
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Adding more than sufficient memory won't speed up your start up times.. Your ram is wiped clean upon every reboot. The cpu needs to process your data (in this case, your bootup items), and it fetches from your hard drive first (assuming that is where your WinXP is installed, which includes the bootup process). Then it'll store the data temporary into the RAM (or cache if high priority) to be reused. This is because access time from the RAM is 1000x faster than Hard Drive. However, if the RAM is full, it'll start fetching data from the Hard Drive, which makes the computer drag no matter how fast the CPU is.
So if you want lightning fast bootup time, get a really FAST (not big) hard drive (10k rpm or one of those Solid State Disks), and a relatively fast Processor to do the calculations. Why? Because it needs to run at least one iteration of the bootup process at the speed of which is bottlenecking everything else. Having more ram is like having a bigger hard drive; it doesn't speed things up, but will cause issues when you don't have enough.
WinXP fits on a CD, which is 700mb at most. I don't expect your computer will use more memory than that even if its compressed. Besides, it's only loading all the core kernel stuff upon startup; not the entire OS into memory. That is why the guy with 128mb will have a horrible time loading up his PC, even if he's equipped with the latest i7 processor.
So if you want lightning fast bootup time, get a really FAST (not big) hard drive (10k rpm or one of those Solid State Disks), and a relatively fast Processor to do the calculations. Why? Because it needs to run at least one iteration of the bootup process at the speed of which is bottlenecking everything else. Having more ram is like having a bigger hard drive; it doesn't speed things up, but will cause issues when you don't have enough.
WinXP fits on a CD, which is 700mb at most. I don't expect your computer will use more memory than that even if its compressed. Besides, it's only loading all the core kernel stuff upon startup; not the entire OS into memory. That is why the guy with 128mb will have a horrible time loading up his PC, even if he's equipped with the latest i7 processor.
Last edited by ultrawasabi; 10-20-09 at 01:18 PM.
#9
10-21-09, 08:52 AM
Had 1 GB of more ram put in, still not lightning fast boot up, but better then what it was, pages load up faster, for $37 plus shipping worth it to me.
Thanks
Thanks
#10
11-02-09, 10:42 AM
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As jmstephens said, change the boot order. By default, the machine is looking for the boot.ini file on one CD, then the next, then a floppy, maybe a thumb drive then the hard drive.
After all that, it loads the operating system onto your hard drive and everything runs from there using your hard drive as virtual memory. Make sure the drive is thoroughly defragged. Go to Crucial.com, check the motherboard and see what it will support. 458MB is kind of the minimum for XP, waaaaayyy below minimum for Vista. Also, maybe it isn't the fastest memory your board will run. And maybe it isn't running in dual channel mode.
After all that, it loads the operating system onto your hard drive and everything runs from there using your hard drive as virtual memory. Make sure the drive is thoroughly defragged. Go to Crucial.com, check the motherboard and see what it will support. 458MB is kind of the minimum for XP, waaaaayyy below minimum for Vista. Also, maybe it isn't the fastest memory your board will run. And maybe it isn't running in dual channel mode.
