In the computing world, more is generally better. More processing cores. More hard disk space. More memory. Intuitively, one would assume that upping the ante for such components bring linearly higher yields. I tested this yesterday on the RAM arena.
Intuition fell flat.
You see, myAcer  Windows 7 notebook comes standard with 4GB of RAM. It’s a 64Bit system, so all memory is used. Prices for RAM keep falling these days, so I got an extra stick for $80. It was cheap. I spend more on starbucks for a week. I plugged in the memory and expected a few things:
-Faster boot
-Quicker load times
-Rapid shutdowns.
Guess what? None of that happened. The PC took longer to boot, to load software and to shut down. That was puzzling. The only thing that improved was reloading apps or multitasking amongst myriad windows.
My first guess was that the ram was bad, but that theory went out the window after thorough testing. Hmmm… what do you think could account for this? IS more memory actually detrimental?
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2 Responses to 'Is 8GB Worth the Upgrade for Win7?'
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Make $995/Mo:
Sure as day!
Performance increase will only be visible if you use application that can actually use all that RAM. It’s like buying a $600 video card and complaining that it doesn’t make the computer boot faster. That’s simply not what it does. The purpose of RAM is to hold stuff that currently open applications are working on right now, so the hard disk (much slower than RAM) doesn’t do as much work. Unless you’re doing heavy Photoshopping, video editing, animation, or playing Crysis (one of the very few games that takes advantage of that much RAM), your computer simply will never fill up that much RAM. As for your boot time decrease, there are 3 reasons for it. The first is that you don’t appear to be doing anything that will benefit from the extra RAM. The second is that adding physical sticks of RAM will hamper performance slightly (e.g. 4 sticks of 1gb RAM will be slower than 2 sticks of 2gb RAM). The third is Win7 sees the extra memory and “preloads” commonly used files into RAM. With more space available, more preloading occurs, which accounts for the bulk of your extra boot seconds.
To summarize: Unless you’re doing something that explicitly needs more RAM, you simply will never reap the benefit from more than about 4 GB. And one more point: keep the number of sticks in multiples of 2, and always match the sticks exactly. Not matching and having an odd number of sticks may disable dual channel, which will harm performance overall.
You have to pay attention on the CAS latency and the memory speed when you adding more RAM to your computer. Just like Anonymous said, you might want to have 2 piece of RAM of the same size rather than having 1 piece. It will allow you to run the dual channel feature.
So, my speculation is that OP did disable the dual channel feature by adding (or changing) 1 piece of RAM. Or OP bought a slower RAM (high CAS latency or low memory speed) compared to what OP had originally.
My answer is yes, 8GB ram on windows 7 is worth to have for the purposes Anonymous stated (heavy Photoshopping, video editing, animation, or playing Crysis)as well as doing heavy multitasking (ex: open 7 internet explorer, online on msn messenger with 20 active chat, online on team speak, and play WoW at the same time).