Definitely. I upgraded my friends' computer from 512 MB to 2 GB over Christmas and it's running really well. They needed two 1 GB sticks and Sam's had it for around $24.00 each. If you don't know what kind of memory your computer takes or if you have the space to upgrade, check out www.crucial.com. You can enter your make and model number and find out, or it will run a scan if you want it to.
it's lenovos consumer line...quality is the same as any other crap you can get at circuit city/ best buy. ever since lenovo was bought out from ibm, quality has gone down, even on the business models.
on what operating system? on xp, even just going to 1GB you will see difference. vista, 2GB will be real good.
Six to 8 gigs is only going to help on 64bit OS's like Vista 64bit - it won't do diddly for 32-bit Vista. I have 8 gigs on the machine I'm typing on, and it's perfect for me. Charts like that PC World chart above annoy the heck out of me. Tell me what is being multi-tasked? "I was listening to an mp3 while typing an email to mom" is not exactly much multi-tasking to me. Photoshop - what are they editing? "Cousin Joe's birthday pic" or something on a larger scale? Here's some "down-to-earth" commentary from Ed Bott : http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=282 BTW, I ran Vista on 2 GB for quite a while and had no issues other than 1 issue with a memory hogging game (Supreme Commander).
Thats only if you are running one app at a time. Who does that? We aren't running DOS. I have 6 applications running as I type. I'm waiting for my work issued 8 gig laptop that I'm getting this year.That's if I don't get laid off first.
obviously you didn't read the article DoD posted. i will quote it for you. In more than a month of sometimes insanely heavy use with each one, I have never reached a state where either one performed unacceptably because it was gasping for RAM. It’s really, really difficult to use 2GB of RAM with any edition of Windows Vista. At the moment, as you can see from the Task Manager snippet on the right, I’m running 81 processes on this desktop PC, including the following: That’s a lot of stuff, but I’m not even close to using up the 2GB of RAM installed on this machine. According to Task Manager, 1.44GB are in use by all processes from all users, including caches and indexing tasks and other system functions. From experience, I know I could open another half-dozen programs and rip a music CD and still not notice any change in performance. If you use a similar mix of apps, you should see similar results. For that type of heavy multitasking, the bump from 1GB to 2GB has a clear impact and costs very little. But adding an extra 2GB beyond that doesn’t usually result in any noticeable improvement in performance or reliability.
Well currently I running Notes, Flash, Photoshop, one instance of IE, SnagIt, and Yahoo messenger and I'm at 2.13 gigs on a 3 gig box. I haven't even fired up a vmware session yet where I do my real work nor do I have any Java processes running. I will not work on a machine with less than 2 gigs of RAM. It's too damn frustrating.
I bought my Dell with a quad-core 2.4ghz with 4gb RAM, 800gb HD for a similar price last year, but it was a refurbished unit.
Nah, that price is about right. With Intel's new Core i7 processor released on the market, Core 2 Duo/Quad processors are falling in price now. I'm buying the following computer tomorrow for $649: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3.0 ghz) 2G DDR2 Ram 500G SATA HDD NVIDIA 9500GT 512 MB 22X DVD-RW Case, keyboard, mouse, etc. Sweet deal.
It's true that people do often simplify things into "RAM = Speed." That's true to a point, as we've been talking about... 1GB just isn't enough anymore for most people. But once you get up to 2GB or 3GB, more RAM starts to have very little meaning. Once you have 3GB of RAM, your machine will need improvements in other areas to see performance increases. The obvious ones are processing speed (duh), bus speed, and hard drive access speed (RPM and cache, unless you're one of those lucky bastards with a solid state drive). It still mystifies me why hard drive RPMs is so commonly absent from spec sheets. Going from a 5400rpm drive to a 7200rpm drive makes a big difference in performance... and then of course there's the dinosaur 4200rpm drives, and the lightning-fast 10000rpm ones. But few people seem to notice. Weird. Exactly. All of a sudden Duo Cores are last-gen, as is DDR2 memory. So computers that were top-of-the line a year ago are now going for comparative peanuts. Pretty good time to buy. Or if you're a sucker for technology like me, you go get a machine with an i7 in it a week after it's released. I like to stay ahead of the curve. (Incidentally, I think my computer I bought at Best Buy was a pretty killer deal: Gateway with 2.66 Ghz i7 processor, 3 GB DDR3 RAM (the only kind i7s use), 750GB 7200rpm hard drive, Radeon HD 4850, for... $1200. Last I checked they had actually increased the price by $50, probably because they couldn't keep them on shelves).
the weakest link is i think the hard drive. i really want to get a solid state one in my next computer (pretty soon). if i can't afford that, i will have to settle for a 10K one. i am tired of these fast computers being slowed down by old 7200 technology. only time for a slow drive is good is for data archiving.
New chipset, processors, motherboards, and memory kits make previously released hardware a lot cheaper. Memory has hit rock bottom and the video card wars has really made it a good time to upgrade your graphics card.
Ugghhh. After 3 hours on the phone with customer service, it seems as if the deal was too good to be true. Looks like the deal offered was a "web error". They sent me a 500GB 3GB Ram computer instead. They will take it back, but they won't give me the computer I ordered. They have the computer I ordered, but for $600. They say they are protected by their fine print, which says web errors will not be upheld. Is $600 for a Quad 4 Intel processor with 1 TB of HD space and 4GB of RAM too much? Should I say screw them and try to find a better deal online? Would anyone know where to find a better deal online?
