Computer Memory| should you upgrade?

Many people believe that pouring more physical memory into their computers will make their systems run faster, but this is not always the case. Speed in a computer is determined by 3 factors; the processor speed, the hard drive access speed, AND the amount of memory. But what really dictates the speed of your computer is the processor speed, everything you do in the computer have to go through the processor

and if that processor is not fast enough it does not matter how much memory your computer has, it always will be slow. A fast processor has a clock speed of about 2GHz to 3 and something GHz with good memory on L1 and L2 caches. The most well known processors are Intel and AMD. so before you buy memory make sure your processor has room for speed. You can check the processor speed on your windows machines by right clicking my computer and going to properties, the info should be at the bottom in the general tab.

Hard drive access is also important when it comes to computer performance, IDE drives are usually slower that Serials or SATA and SCSI drive. IDE and SATA drives are the most used in home PCs while SCSI is most used in big servers. You can find information about your hard drive speed by using free tools like this http://belarc.com/ it will give a total report of your resources on your computer. Also is good to keep the hard drive clean and neat, refer to my earlier posts to do this http://helpdeskgeek.com/?p=8

Memory is good for running programs, when you have a lot of memory and a good processor your computer is happy, how much is enough memory? Well if you can afford as much as your computer support that’s up to you, but for most of the basic stuff a 1 GB is good enough, with 512 MB at the minimum.