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[OM] OT Notes on Upgrading - I - Memory

Subject: [OM] OT Notes on Upgrading - I - Memory
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 14:17:48 -0700
For those benighted souls still in the thrall of Windoze --- And 
especially for those who asked for a report.

As mentioned before, I've bought a new box with Vista, simple comparison 
of old and new below.

My biggest reason for the upgrade was to get better performance with PS, 
the app where I spend the most time and also the one with the slowest 
response for many functions on larger files.

 From what I've read and heard and my own experience some time ago 
upgrading the old box from one to two mb of RAM, it seems that the 
biggest factor in performance speed is memory.

Some often confusing research into Intel memory management and Windoze 
memory usage capabilities led me to discover that the maximum user 
memory to be available without uncertain tricks on 32 bit Win is 3.12 
mb, even with 4 mb installed. The larger causes are related to Intel and 
MS technical decisions that only abate with 64 bit or memory swapping 
schemes that seemed to be overkill and asking for niggling trouble for 
my purposes. I want speed, sure, but stability as well.

The proximate cause is that hardware requires memory address space 
within the 4gb directly addressable. So if you have 4 gb and also a 512 
mb video card, half of your top gb of memory is mapped out to 
accommodate the video card, and so on for other hardware uses. So I 
settled on 3 gb of memory, ordering the box with 1 gb in 512 mb cards, 
which turned out to be a wiser move than I knew. I then bought 2 more gb 
as 2 1 gb cards of premium memory for $115 after rebate, much less than 
if ordered with the box.

I installed the memory before even plugging in the box. Looking at the 
manual for the motherboard, I discovered that optimum performance is 
achieved with pairs of matched memory cards installed in the right 
order. Three 1 gb cards would not be as good as the 2x512mb + 2x1gb 
set-up I had more or less by chance. It all has something to do with the 
'2' in DDR2 and dual or interleaved access, or something like that.

So I fired it up, and sure enough, there are 3 gb of memory, but the 
available and used in Task Manager don't add up to that , and are about 
what I had on the old box. Install PS CS2, and the memory available to 
PS is also about what it was.

When I fished around on the web and in MS's site wehn researching how 
much memory to get, I got lots of hits about problems with 4 gb 
installed and much less showing in Win. And of the solutions proposed, 
most showed how to use the /3G boot file switch. Outside sources 
generally gave this advice for both XP and Vista, having apparently 
simply added Vista to their text for XP or not carefully read the MS 
references. Even on the MS site, most hits about 3 or 4 gb of memory 
focus on the XP usage of the /3G switch. And NOBODY says anything about 
usage with 3 gb of memory installed.

Even the MS reference to the correct command doesn't provide a command 
line example. So here is the straight dope on how to implement it. 
http://www.cadforum.cz/cadforum_en/qaID.asp?tip=5551

And, yes, it does work for 3 gb of memory. The PS preference page on 
memory now shows almost 2.7 gb total available, about 900 mb more - 
Yipee! My old setting was for PS to use 80% of the 1757 mb of available 
memory = 1406 mb, and leaving 351 mb for other apps, all assuming that 
PS is started first and resulting in lots of paging for other apps if 
many are running.

On the new box, PS shows 2658 mb available. Using 82% gives PS 2180 mb 
and leaves 478 for the rest. I may adjust this based on experience. So 
PS memory is increased by 55%.

By the way, the same result should be possible with many motherboards 
and XP with 3 gb of memory and the /3G switch. Fortunately, I didn't 
learn all this too soon, or I might not have had enough reason to buy 
the new toy. ;-)

Yes, PS was already faster with a dual core processor and yes, more 
memory made it even faster. I haven't benchmarked anything, but the 
difference is huge. I'm quite pleased with it so far.

Old:
2.8ghz Pentium 4
2gb of DDR 433 mhz memory
Boot disk EIDE ATA 100
Windoze XP SP2

New:
2.67ghz Core2 Duo
3 gb of DDR2 800mhz memory
Boot disk SATA 3G
Windoze Vista Home Premium

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