Upgrading a PC

[edhesketh]

What is the relationship between the speed of the processor and the amount of RAM? My pc has a 600Mhz Celeron processor and 64mb of RAM which I have upgraded to 192mb. Can I get it to run faster if I by more RAM or will this have limited impact with such a slow processor?

[j2buttonsw]

Random Access Memory or RAM allows you to run applications (or programs): the more RAM the more applications you can run. The central processing unit or CPU determines how efficiently the application (or program) is run as this is the thing that does all the calculations the application needs. One could argue that you can use less RAM in a system with a very high spec CPU or that you need more RAM for a slow CPU system. The rule of thumb is that adding more RAM will increase performance until the CPU becomes the bottle neck. In real terms it depends on what applications you are using: the internet and office applications require low CPU/RAM usage whereas Cubase or the modern high end games require very high CPU/RAM specification. A celeron 600 with 192 MB RAM will be adequate for 99% of a computer's needs but if you want to run high end applications I would upgrade them both (to 1 GB RAM and quad P4 Xeon processors).

[andjac]

sorry to intrude on your Q&A but I can post an answer but not a question for some strange reason can anyone help?

[cupra]

Sorry again, edhesketh, but I've started another thread for andjac (I also have similar probs) - if anyone has any ideas can you post suggestions there??

[lisaj]

j2: I think a quad-xeon might be severe overkill for all but those of us running high-transaction enterprise databases! On another note, you can't use less RAM in a machine with a fast CPU because they do different things!! RAM holds your open applications and data: if you have a small amount of RAM, then you'll be paging to hard disk the whole time and no matter how fast your processor, you'll be restricted by the (relatively prehistoric) speeds of the hard disk. The internet *should* use almost no memory, but I see IE swallowing 50Mb upwards looking at this site, let alone anything more intensive - it's all up to the programmer's abilities and suffice to say Microsoft's aren't particularly sensible. The trick to hardware selection is to grasp what each component offers you. If you need to have loads of programs running (say, a web application server) you'll need lots of memory; if you need to perform complex processing tasks quickly (say, recalculating a 2.5million cell spreadsheet), you need a faster processor; if you need faster graphics performance (like a game), you'll be wanting a better graphics processor or video card. If you're reading and writing from disk the whole time (database transactions), you'll be needing a very fast SCSI disk subsystem.