How does ram effect performance?

[Mr Coffeehouse]

I'm looking to increase performance of when running programs like Tracktion on my computer.

I have a pc laptop running at 3.2gig with something like 384megs of ram. (Specifically, DDR SDRAM, PC2700/333 MHz) This type of ram is reccomended for my machine by the manufacturer. I have the option of installing on my machine up to 2 gigs of this ram.

I was wondering if this will have an effect on performance or not when running programs such as Tracktion (with VSTi's), or is the processer speed really the thing, or is it something else.

Can anyone give me some insight here?

Much appreciated,
Mike from The Coffeehouse

[C00kie]

Often with laptops it is not CPU power, it is not RAM size, it is the harddisk that can't keep up with the rest. Or components are running at slower speed to prevent them from getting too hot or to preserve battery power.

Try to open the performance monitor (Ctrl-Alt-Del, choose Task Manager.) There you can see weather you need more RAM or the CPU reaches 100% utilisation. I seriously doubt it...

An important factor is which VSTi you use. Which are your favorites? Stuff like Z3ta+ and SIR are very demanding on CPU, other big sample libraries want fast harddisks and lots of RAM.

[valley]

That said, on XP running on under 512MB is basically running under-powered.

I'd say an investment in an upgrade to 512MB, if not 1GB is a worthwhile one.

C00kie is right, hdd performance matters, but the more RAM you have the less paging is going on, so you can at least remove some of the load on your hard drive.

[Crossinger]

That said, on XP running on under 512MB is basically running under-powered.
I'd say an investment in an upgrade to 512MB, if not 1GB is a worthwhile one.

I can tell my own experiences here. I'm using Tracktion on a pretty shitty old Thinkpad R30 (1GHz). Originally I was running under Win2k with 256MB RAM.

Recently I did an upgrade for business purposes: Doubeling RAM and XP prof. My observations: T runs "smoother" than before. It still isn't a top performer for audio sequencing, but some of my projects are running now without many frozen tracks and without CPU level at the edge of red alert (as they did before).

So far, this investment was a good one...

J.