# How much performance increase from more RAM?

## sfabius

I am running Gentoo on a Dell Inspiron 5000, Pentium 3, 128M RAM. I use blackbox and the applications I use most frequently are Evolution, OpenOffice, Phoenix, XMMS, and Praat (a speech analysis program). If I upgrade my memory to 256 or 512, does the Gentoo public think I will see signficant gains in speed? That is, should I spend the $200, or wait for a while and get a new machine?

BTW, Gentoo is already much more nimble than my previous Debian system on this machine.

Scott

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## slais-sysweb

 *sfabius wrote:*   

> I am running Gentoo on a Dell Inspiron 5000, Pentium 3, 128M RAM. 
> 
>  If I upgrade my memory to 256 or 512, does the Gentoo public think I will see signficant gains in speed? That is, should I spend the $200, or wait for a while and get a new machine?
> 
> Scott

 

Definately, especially as I think your estimate of cost of memory is rather high. In the UK I would expect to pay no more than £60 for 512KB.

Memory is far more important than processor speed, especially when compiling. Never buy a new machine before the oldone has max memory.

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## sfabius

Thanks- The memory price is from crucial.com; gotta get 2 x 256. Any advice on where to get it cheaper wouldbe appreciated.

SFK

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## DefconAlpha

I don't think you're going to have room to put 2 256MB SO-DIMM's in your computer. I don't know of any laptops that have that many expansions.

RAM isn't everything, but it is important. Having a moderately large amount of RAM is sufficient for most everything today; massive amounts doesn't make your box faster, just able to hold more at one time...

Go to Dell's website and make sure that your laptop can handle some high-density ram (neccessary for that much ram), then go Pricewatching (or if you're uber-l337, try froogle.google.com)

Try this link: http://www.jandr.com/JRProductPage.process?RestartFlow=t&Merchant_Id=1&Product_Code=PNY+N512S133W&source=google.datafeed.PNY+N512S133W.text

(and yes, PC133 works with PC100)

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## klarnox

I have been unable to get more that 384 MB RAM to work with anything but Crucial memory in my Inspiron 5000, though my 5000e doesn't seem to have any problems.

It seems they can handle a single 256  MB and 128 MB stick for a total of 384 MB, but not two 256 MB sticks (unless they're Crucial).  I don't know why this is.  I've been very careful about specs on the memory I have tried.

I would suggest getting a single 256 memory module for your laptop, assuming the 128 that's there is a single stick.  You won't really see much (if any) improvement from 384 MB to 512 MB.

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## Malakin

The system should have 2 memory slots in it. If you have a single 128M stick in it now I'd get a 256M stick and add it. If you currently have two 64's then you might as well get rid of them get buy 2 256's.

A 256M stick of notebook memory costs me $79can which is about $53usd. You shouldn't need to pay much more then that for it. We're just talking 100mhz sdram ram here, nothing fancy so I don't see any reason to buy expensive memory for it.

Regardless of what memory you buy you should always run memtest86 on it just to make sure there are no errors.

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## dweigert

I have a Dell CPxJ laptop, and if you look at the crucial website, you'll notice that the RAM is different for these machines.   It has to do with how the machines address the ram on the SO-Dimm.  It uses an older techmology dimm that had 16 smaller chips on it rather than higher density ones.  The limit I believe is two 256MB dimms.

Dan

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## marshall_j

To check if you need more memory run the 'top' command while you've got everything you normally do open.

If your memory is near full and you are beggining to use your swap space then memory should definatly help.

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## mlynx

My laptop is definitely on the older end of the scale (PII300, 196M RAM) but when I decided to upgrade from 64M, the difference was very noticeable.  I was able to do more without the frequent thrashing as the system wrote everything out to swap.  

The place that I got my RAM was www.18004memory.com

They had the right chips for about a third of everyone else.  Since this was an older machine, finding the right RAM was critical.  

I was also thrilled on the turnaround (I paid for the insured US Postal Service and got the RAM in three days).  

What made me really happy was their return policy on RAM (when buying things like this I really make sure that I know what to do if stuff goes wrong before I give out CC info).  I felt confident that if it didn't work, I wasn't going to be stuck with dead electronics.

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