[OT] Computer upgrades (was: RAM upgrades)

[Kibo]

More RAM makes things go faster. The reason is that when you run out of physical RAM, the OS swaps lesser-used portions of memory out to the hard drive ("virtual memory"). Reading and writing to the HD is *much* slower than reading/writing RAM. The more physical memory you have, the less swapping is needed which makes the whole thing run faster.

There is something of a caveat missing in there. Adding more ram often increases the size of your swap file. And depending on your hard drive and its state, this in some instances actually will decrease your performance. Sometimes drastically.

Oh and wait till the new set of HD's come out, a nice 320 GB from Maxtor, that'll push prices lower, as will the switch to Serial ATA.

 

[Psionicist]

There is something of a caveat missing in there. Adding more ram often increases the size of your swap file. And depending on your hard drive and its state, this in some instances actually will decrease your performance. Sometimes drastically.

Oh and wait till the new set of HD's come out, a nice 320 GB from Maxtor, that'll push prices lower, as will the switch to Serial ATA.

That is not completely true. You can force most operatingsystems to use a fixed sized swap-file. Mine is set at 640mb and it works all right.

And why would anyone who don't even use 20GB need 320GB? I'd spend that money on a real SCSI-subsystem instead.

 

[Kibo]

And why would anyone who don't even use 20GB need 320GB? I'd spend that money on a real SCSI-subsystem instead.

...that'll push prices lower...

It's early for me too.

And yeah, SCSI is faster...but it's a whole lot more expensive. But since I'm all about "that'll push prices lower", I'll just say it has its places. For a desktop, IDE is fine.