Upgrade to 1.5GB Memory

[atct86]

I purchased Photoshop CS2 and go between using .5 to 1.25 gb of memory. This means that i am taping into virtual memory.

Would the benefit of jumping to 1.5gb of memory with a new 1gb card help me? would it only be noticeable in photoshop?

[leegaard]

In my opinion its always a good idea and reason to avoid using the swapfile instead of of the oridinary.

I allways see swapfile as an emergency solution when you dont have sufficient RAM.

So IMHO its a good idea - Or try to sell both of your 512 and get 2 1 GB sticks

[christopher_wolf]

You would tap into virtual memory anyway unless you turned it off or set it to a very small amount in Windows. If you are going to be using Photoshop CS alot, then you might consider. First, before you buy the memory, try it out with the memory you already have; if that isn't enough for Photoshop CS to perform to your expectations, then you should go ahead and get a memory upgrade. HTH

[cerebral_mamba]

I purchased Photoshop CS2 and go between using .5 to 1.25 gb of memory. This means that i am taping into virtual memory.

Would the benefit of jumping to 1.5gb of memory with a new 1gb card help me? would it only be noticeable in photoshop?

Wow!! 1.25GB of memory is an awefull lot for a piece of sh** heavy weight hyped junk like PS CS2. People often complain Microsoft about making bloated software, but frankly Adobe takes the cake when it comes to bloated software. Anyway, just like windwos, since PS is unique and established itself as the professional junk out there, one is forced to use it.

Getting to your question. YES YES yES....... if you are tapping into your virtual memory, upgrading the RAM will improve your performance many folds. Personally I can't understand how you are using it with virtual memory being used so much..... I had 512Mb first and the moment my system takes more that that, [censored]... it gets so darn slow, that too with my 7200RPM HDD. If you have a 5400RPM drive, its even worse. definiitely go ahead and make the upgrade.

[chan_man]

I have 1.5 gig and it is the only way to go especially if you do graphic intensive or CAD designs. The only problem with having more than 1 gig of memory is that some machines will have problems going into hibernation, it is an XP problem but there is a beta fix out there.

[leegaard]

Hmm .. I am quite certain that i have not encountered any problems with hibernation on either of my >1GB machines

[o1001010]

my 2 cents:

unless you do heavy cad / ps / gaming on your thinkpad, you don't need more than 512 ram.

[leegaard]

A lot in computing can be catogorized into "need to have" and "nice to have"

Certainly you can run almost smoothless with 512 MB ... more is just very nice to have as it gives a even more smooth execution of programs.

My T23 @ 866 gets the job done too ,, but its just more satisfactory to work with my T42´s

But when you buy a system for around $ 2K .. it not a big extra investmest to give around $ 250 to finish the job with max RAM.

It will also make the system a bit more futureproof, and in my case I dont think PC2700 RAM gets much cheaper

[o1001010]

do remember this is a laptop and more unessential ram = shorter battery life due to memory refreshing

[leegaard]

I think your are into totally bogus now.

I am quite certain that powerconsumption is much much lower on memory refresh than on swapping on a harddrive.

But of course I am willing to learn if you can point me to some evidence on your theory.

[ricerocket]

do remember this is a laptop and more unessential ram = shorter battery life due to memory refreshing

But not enough RAM = more hard drive activity = a LOT LESS battery life.

I get 4.5 hours on a 9 cell w/ 1.5 GB. I think that's pretty good.

my 2 cents:

unless you do heavy cad / ps / gaming on your thinkpad, you don't need more than 512 ram.

Really? After bootup, my computer is at 350 MB commit charge with all the Thinkpad crap that gets preloaded (albeit some are useful). Add one or two browsers, Outlook, and I'm at 400. If Firefox has to load anything in Java, add another 30-50 MB for the JRE. Need to read something in Acrobat? Slap some more on. You can see where this is going, right? 512 MB is really the bare minimum.

[leegaard]

Well .. And that was the intial question - The user did use the swap on occasions.

So we dont seem to disagree.

I have investigated at bit, and it seems that its more a question of the RAM manufacturer than on the amount.

Another issue. Having plenty of RAM will mean that a system set aside a bigger diskcache which often means that content will be fetched from cache rather than from drive. So my conclusion will be that max RAM will not have a noticable impact on batterylife, and if so, perhaps not even in a bad direction. But again - if you can find tests that shows otherwise, I am very willing to learn.

[w0qj]

If you do any DVD video editing, you definitely need minimum 1 GB of RAM.
The Suite itself use up about 850 MB of RAM, and this does not even include the (Gigabytes) of video and audio files that you'll be working with.

Also needs lots of hard drive space...

I've just upgraded to a 7K100 HDD for this very reason...


btw, the 7K100 is noticably faster than 7K60 by quite a bit.
it can write to HDD faster than reading from CD-ROM or external USB HDD.
so much smoother multitasking in the background...

[reltor]

do remember this is a laptop and more unessential ram = shorter battery life due to memory refreshing

But not enough RAM = more hard drive activity = a LOT LESS battery life.

I get 4.5 hours on a 9 cell w/ 1.5 GB. I think that's pretty good.

my 2 cents:

unless you do heavy cad / ps / gaming on your thinkpad, you don't need more than 512 ram.

Really? After bootup, my computer is at 350 MB commit charge with all the Thinkpad crap that gets preloaded (albeit some are useful). Add one or two browsers, Outlook, and I'm at 400. If Firefox has to load anything in Java, add another 30-50 MB for the JRE. Need to read something in Acrobat? Slap some more on. You can see where this is going, right? 512 MB is really the bare minimum.

If you are using just 300mb of RAM and you have 2gb does the extra ram use resources? I have wondered.

[chan_man]

Hmm .. I am quite certain that i have not encountered any problems with hibernation on either of my >1GB machines

This problem does not happen to all machines, but my machine as well as a friend does exhibit this problem and was really hard to figure out. Finallly found a link to a beta fix from Microsoft to fix it. Have not had a problem since.

[Troels]

Also considering the upgrade from 512MB to 1.5GB, since the page file is always at 350 MB and often goes to 500 MB, but i'm still doubting whether it is a waste. I do game some (HL2 occasionally and the like), and will be doing some programming.
I always have a lot of windows open because i'm too lazy to shut them down most of the time.
Do applications run better ? Did you think it was a overkill after you upgraded ?

[davidspalding]

Photoshop will most definitely work smoothly for you jumping from 512 mb ram to 1.5 Gb. There's a tip on Adobe's site about enabling the "Bigger Tiles" extension. Look under \extensions, there's a HTML file that explains the setting.

I have no problems hibernating. I do have glitches suspending regularly. So ... I just log out, then hibernate.

[smugiri]

This thread has some more info on this.

[jhonyl]

Generally, I think that the fear of virtual memory is exaggerated. Going deap into the VM may or may not penalize you depending on what you do, and how you do it. If you want to know more read about VM, maybe at howstuffworks or something like that.

But, some applications are taking memory away from the windows VM system, and when they do that that memory is available only to that app, and not to anything else that run on your computer. I have heard that PhotoShop may do that. If it does, than how much you let it take will not be available anywhere else, and so if you say have 768MB of RAM, and let it take 700MBs, then you are left with only 68MBs for everything else, which isn't much. Other programs that does that are virtual machines programs, like VMWare, and Qemu.

However most programs are not like that, and I for instance, don't experience any slow down from VM usage with my 768MBs of RAM. Even if the memory do get bloated some times (1.2GB) by poor memory managment of Mozilla, and Opera, which I use.

[davidspalding]

Photoshop doesn't necessarily take 98% of your RAM if you tell it to. I've tried.