Do i need more memory?

[adamhornsby]

My computer which is a cople of years old, seems to be very slow when running the Sims 2. It has a fast processor, enough graphic memory, enough hard-drive, (I'd say, 200GB). But it only has 1GB of memory so i thinking of upgrading the memory so if i put 2 x 1GB sticks in, will they speed it up any?
Also the sticks that are already in are two 512mb, so would i get away with adding the other 2 beside them or would i have to change the exsisting ones?

[adamhornsby]

Sorry a couple of years old. Mind is all over the place!

[cazzz1975]

You do need to upgrade, XP and vista alone eat up memory due to the security updates, 2mb+ is recommended now, in the meantime you could try defragging your drives and delete any useless programs

with regard to upgrade

have you got a manual for your motherboard? It will tell you what memory combinations you can fit. However normally if you have two 512k chips, they will upgrade to 2x1mb

I would suggest when you buy the ram, take the computer with you as some memory you can buy has configuration problems with certain motherboards. That way you can see it fired up and working ok.

Of course if you own a branded PC and you buy the same branded ram, you are less likely to have a problem with incompatibility between motherboard and ram

[ACtheTROLL]

sorry cazzz ... but that's absolute rubbish
1Gb is a HUGE amount of system ram.
Crysis, bioshock call of duty4 will all work very hapily in 1Gb
as would most graphics and movie editors.

To answer your question adam Yes you could update by adding 2 more 512 sticks ....
look on http://crucial.com/
and run the online scanner
or here
http://www.kingston.com/

but I seriously doubt that you'd see any real difference to anything but your bank account.

the sims isn't a particularly memory hungry game ... but a simulator does need a lot of processor time.

If your machine is a couple of years old you could probably benefit more from a complete system rebuild (I do mine about every 12 months)

but by far the easiest thing to try first .....
Clear out some of the detritus by downloading CC Cleaner (don't get too carried away ... just temp files!)
and run the defragger.
.... you might be surprised

[adamhornsby]

the processor is a 3.6ghz intel pentium 4 with hyper threading, so i doubt that is obselete
last weekend i gave it a good defragg and got rid of some useless programmes.

I do want it upgrading for christmas, and my dad went into pcworld the other day, and asked the salesperson about upgrading the memory. He told him the model number, and the salesperson was surprised at how well spec it was ,despite it being 2 years old and discontinued.

I think ill put 2 x 1gb sticks in.

[ACtheTROLL]

the guy was right ... the spec you quote is firing on all cylinders

2Gb will take your machine to it's limit (for not much gain) .... simply adding 2x512 will do the job (my 486 used 4 x 512 too - I recently donated 1Gb to a friend - and saw no drop in performance).

2x1Gb sticks won't create any better response (works similar to a raid0 array
(and so could actually slow your system slightly).
1x2Gb will react even worse

The old memory will be useless - a single core processor is rapidly approaching the "not as good as a modern �300.00 system" barrier ... so why spend extra money? ....

save it towards a dual or quad gaming beast