Laptop and RAM

[spider69]

Any of the many intelligent guys out there offer some info wrt RAM?
I have a laptop (Packard Bell V7411) and only have 512 Mb RAM. So I decided to get some more as a part of a mid life upgrade. Decided on 1 Gb and bought "correct" RAM. Used a program called geekbench (http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench) to see before and after speeds.
I was very surprised to see that my 512 mb actually performed better than my new 1Gb. Took to PC shop and asked questions. They say they cant believe it and tried for themselves. Then they said that geekbench was not the programe to test performance. Then they said that some PC's work better with RAM in both slots. Then they said that only certain manufactures RAM works best. Then they said they would have to test it. So they are now keeping my PC for overnight observation with still no further ideas....

Why all the hoohaa about getting a PC better performing when running extra RAM?
Anyone that can give a possible answer? Am I expecting too much? Am I using the correct tests? Am I not being too expectant ?

 

[DJNgoma]

Seems like they were trying to get a quick buck out of you by selling cheap and slow RAM, plus most sales people in some computer shops massage reality or act like a weasel and omit important aspects of the product being sold and make you seem like the dumbass in the equation.

 

[Conradl]

Perhaps its your understanding of the benefits of extra RAM that is wrong....

Basically there are two aspects here: Firstly, there is RAM speed and there is RAM capacity . Secondly, the speed/performance of your actual RAM and the speed/performance of your system due to RAM.

What you did was upgrade the capacity (size) of your RAM, this will allow you to run applications without paging occuring, thus improving performance of your entire system. However, for whatever reason, the speed/performance of the actual RAM module is less than the previous RAM module.

Think of RAM as if it were a minibus, a 24 seat bus with a speed limit of 100 will have better overall performance (in terms of delivering people over a period of time) than a 16 seater going 120 (if running at full capacity)....

It would seem that the test that you are performing is incorrect - the real benefits would only be seen when your system starts using more than 512MB RAM. So you would need to launch a few apps, Office, Firefox etc, and then see if the system was any faster....

If you run windows XP then your system will be faster with 1GB slower RAM, than 512MB faster RAM....

 

[spider69]

Thanks Conrad. Got now 2 GB RAM and system seem to be faster when opening large progs and files....