Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
If you decide to upgrade to a more powerful computer system or motherboard, you usually can't
salvage the memory from your previous system. Most of the time it is best to plan on equipping a new
board with the optimum type of memory that it supports.
Be sure to carefully weigh your future needs for computing speed and a multitasking OS against the
amount of money you spend to upgrade current equipment.
How can you tell if you have enough memory or not? The best way is to run your most demanding
applications (all that would be open at the same time and with your largest datasets) and then check
the memory usage using the Windows Task Manager (taskmgr.exe). With Task Manager running, click
on the Performance tab to see the amount of Physical Memory being used vs. the total available.
Under Windows 7/8 and Vista the memory usage is shown both as a percentage of the total as well as
an amount. Figure 6.17 shows the Task Manager running on a Windows 7 system reporting 18% or
2.85GB of memory being used on a system with 16GB installed. Figure 6.18 shows the Task Manager
running on a Windows XP system reporting 1.63GB being used (under the misnomer “PF Usage”) on
a system with about 3.5GB of RAM available (4GB minus about 0.5GB reserved by the hardware),
which is about 47% of the total. If you see the amount of physical memory being used is higher than
around 80% of the total then you might consider adding more memory. In both of these examples the
amount of memory installed is more than enough to run the applications that were open at the time; in
fact, the system with 16GB installed would have been fine with 8GB or less.
Figure 6.17. Windows 7 Task Manager showing 18% or 2.85GB Physical Memory use on a
system with 16GB installed.
 
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