Is Windows 10 faster with more memory even if much is unused?

[Simon97]

I'm helping someone with a computer issue. They are complaining about a slow performing computer. It has 4GB of ram and a little less than half is free. Hard drive is mostly empty. I did some basic checks such as a virus scan and it seems okay.

I wonder if there is any significant benefit to increasing the memory? User is not in a position to upgrade to a new machine at this point.

 

[tkbslc]

If your browsing the internet, no. If you're using an application that does something like uses a database, yes.

It wouldn't just have to be using a database. It would have to manipulating massive tables, potentially with multiple users.

 

[Mystery member]

If they have 32-bit Windows 10 Home version then the most the operating system can use is 3.5GB so adding more memory does nothing. With the Mac OS the extra RAM was usable as a RAM scratch disk. But then the Apple operating system is a modern one and so has more capabilities and performs better than the Windows versions which are based on 1995 NT 3.51.

Spoken like a true believer.

Very important with any hard drive that is used for Adobe applications to do a weekly defrag of the hard drive after doing a disk cleanup and removing any temporary files. If a file is in 20 fragments it takes many more rotations of the disc to read each one and load it into memory.

Defrag doesn't do much except accelerate HDD wear.

 

[Morris0]

Defrag doesn't do much except accelerate HDD wear.

Wow...

While it does work the drive, most experiance a significant speed up.

Morris

 

[Ho72]

If they have 32-bit Windows 10 Home version then the most the operating system can use is 3.5GB so adding more memory does nothing. With the Mac OS the extra RAM was usable as a RAM scratch disk. But then the Apple operating system is a modern one and so has more capabilities and performs better than the Windows versions which are based on 1995 NT 3.51.

FYI, 32-bit Windows apps have been Large Address Aware since the XP days, possibly before. In plain language, when a 32-bit application is so configured it can access up to 4 GB of RAM, or, more realistically, exceed the normal 2GB limit—have to leave room for the OS. Back in the day, to enable this required some editing of the of the boot.ini file but it was a trivial matter. I used this capability routinely with Photoshop.

I think this may have been restricted to x64 CPUs such as the Athlon X2 I had at the time... it's been awhile so I'm a bit foggy on that.

 

[Mystery member]

Defrag doesn't do much except accelerate HDD wear.

Wow...

While it does work the drive, most experiance a significant speed up.

Large databases may benefit from regular defrag, but most users will never notice the difference. It might have been advantageous when HDDs were slow, but these days, I make a point of disabling auto defrag.

Anyhow, not an issue now that we are in the SSD era. (Defrag verboten).

I remember the days when beginners with a pathetic lack of experience had an almost religious devotion to defrag.

 

[Antioch]

I'm helping someone with a computer issue. They are complaining about a slow performing computer. It has 4GB of ram and a little less than half is free. Hard drive is mostly empty. I did some basic checks such as a virus scan and it seems okay.

I wonder if there is any significant benefit to increasing the memory? User is not in a position to upgrade to a new machine at this point.

What is the computer being used for? What version of Windows are they using ?

Complaining about a slow performing computer on what ? Boot Up, running Adobe etc?

Is it being used for Hard Disk intensive, graphics intensive, memory intensive Use.

You can download performance tests to check it out, and it may not be slow at all?

SSD will help on boot up, as when you click on a new program to start it, it comes up on the screen pretty quick.

If you are using graphic intensive programs, like 4k Video, 42 meg Raw photography files, you need a good graphic card. Graphic cards would be the slowest part of the system with the present 16 bit processing, large data files and intensive graphic calculations using Adobe. Likewise a good monitor to display the same.

Increase in Memory is also greatly needed, 4 GB is the minimum requirement for Windows which can be used for simple browing, email and Office Tasks. You really cannot use it much with the present large programs of Adobe etc today?

Even the Virus programs will slow down to a crawl with that memory.

With inadequate resources on the computer, more Advanced Windows OS will be slower, than the older windows. In other words, every upgrade in Windows will require more memory, more hd, better graphic card etc.

 

[GodSpeaks]

Ok, we know the computer has 4GB of ram, but what is the CPU and exactly what version of Windows is being run? x86 or x64?

 

[Franglais91]

I'm helping someone with a computer issue. They are complaining about a slow performing computer. It has 4GB of ram and a little less than half is free. Hard drive is mostly empty. I did some basic checks such as a virus scan and it seems okay.

I wonder if there is any significant benefit to increasing the memory? User is not in a position to upgrade to a new machine at this point.

My understanding is that if you give a computer more RAM than what it needs then you will slow it down slightly. The computer has to check the RAM at startup and manage it while it's running. In your situation adding more RAM won't help.

 

[Mystery member]

I'm helping someone with a computer issue. They are complaining about a slow performing computer. It has 4GB of ram and a little less than half is free. Hard drive is mostly empty. I did some basic checks such as a virus scan and it seems okay.

I wonder if there is any significant benefit to increasing the memory? User is not in a position to upgrade to a new machine at this point.

My understanding is that if you give a computer more RAM than what it needs then you will slow it down slightly. The computer has to check the RAM at startup and manage it while it's running. In your situation adding more RAM won't help.

Interesting theory, but probably hard to demonstrate, particularly since RAM requirements are dynamic and depend on usage.

We still await specification details from the OP, but I'd always opt for 8Gb or 16Gb.

 

[Archer66]

My understanding is that if you give a computer more RAM than what it needs then you will slow it down slightly.

Never heard this, any links ?

 

[Franglais91]

My understanding is that if you give a computer more RAM than what it needs then you will slow it down slightly.

Never heard this, any links ?

I heard this a long time ago, before Windows 10, before 64-bit operating systems. It might even have been when I was doing my MCSE 20 years ago.

The idea was that Windows has to maintain a list of pages in RAM and the longer the list, the more time it was going to spend maintaining it.

 

[CAcreeks]

My understanding is that if you give a computer more RAM than what it needs then you will slow it down slightly.

Never heard this, any links ?

I heard this a long time ago, before Windows 10, before 64-bit operating systems. It might even have been when I was doing my MCSE 20 years ago.

The idea was that Windows has to maintain a list of pages in RAM and the longer the list, the more time it was going to spend maintaining it.

Thank you for answering the question, Franglais91.

The OP Simon97 has 4GB memory, but did not say if the OS is 64-bit or 32-bit. If the latter, more memory will be ignored, unless W10 is capable of PAE. (?)

I had 8GB memory on a Xeon machine, which was fine with Windows 7. When IT put W10 on the same hardware, 8GB was not enough, so IT upgraded the machine to 16GB. The slow-down was probably caused by excess security software added for the W10 roll-out. I don't believe that memory requirements are significantly greater for W10.

If you have a lot of memory, it should probably be ECC to prevent corruption and crashes, thus a Xeon processor (or equivalent) is needed, especially for commercial applications.

Here's a discussion of too much memory:

https://serverfault.com/questions/1...is-there-an-optimal-level-of-ram-or-is-more-a

There is a comment from Austinian, who might be the same contributor as on this forum.

 

[Sean Nelson]

My understanding is that if you give a computer more RAM than what it needs then you will slow it down slightly.

Never heard this, any links ?

The idea was that Windows has to maintain a list of pages in RAM and the longer the list, the more time it was going to spend maintaining it.

Paging tables are accessed by indexing directly to their address, there's almost never a need to go through the list sequentially. And at CPU speeds, this is such a tiny task that it would be impossible to measure with a stopwatch.

A lot of RAM can slow down the BIOS portion of startup, though. Especially on a machine with ECC RAM where all the memory has to be initialized in order to seed it with valid redundancy information.

 

[Austinian]

There is a comment from Austinian, who might be the same contributor as on this forum.

I don't recall posting that, but it's been a while and I agree with what the small-a austinian said. So it's possible.

Still, I generally prefer to fill only alternate slots to improve DRAM cooling.

 

[Simon97]

I visited my parents yesterday and got a better look at the machine:

• Windows 10 64bit
• Intel Celeron 2.7Ghz (2 cores)
• HDD 250 GB (37% full)
• Memory 4MB about 2GB was in use at the time

I cleaned it up and uninstalled some unused junk on it, then rebooted. It seems okay to me, maybe slightly laggy.

My own computer is an I3 3.3Ghz, 8GB, Win7 64 from 2012 and it is very responsive. My main complaint with it is the slow rendering of H.265 video files (expected). I'm due for a new machine but I have shut down expenditures until I can see how business deals with the current situation going on now.

 

[Morris0]

Defrag doesn't do much except accelerate HDD wear.

Wow...

While it does work the drive, most experiance a significant speed up.

Large databases may benefit from regular defrag, but most users will never notice the difference. It might have been advantageous when HDDs were slow, but these days, I make a point of disabling auto defrag.

Anyhow, not an issue now that we are in the SSD era. (Defrag verboten).

I remember the days when beginners with a pathetic lack of experience had an almost religious devotion to defrag.

I'm sorry, I have a totally different experience. I do agree SSDs are much better till you need to store large volumes of files such as photos

Morris

 

[Ho72]

Unless I missed it, seems like no one is talking about the caching Windows will do with unused RAM. The caching schemes are effective and can, among other benefits, reduce app load times significantly, even if your system disk is an SSD (assumes a prior launch).

 

[PupOnTech]

Above 8gb you won't notice as much of a difference. But windows ten in my experience flat out is slow as molasses on 4gb with a ssd.

 

[Archer66]

Above 8gb you won't notice as much of a difference. But windows ten in my experience flat out is slow as molasses on 4gb with a ssd.

I have an old Samsung laptop with 4Gb memory and slow HDD and Windows 10 runs just fine.

 

[cnyphotoguy]

In Windows 10, open task manager (and if needed choose 'More details' in the lower left), switch to the 'Performance' tab and watch the graphs for CPU, Memory, Disk and Ethernet.

When experiencing sluggishness, inevitably at least one of the four graphs will be higher than the rest. Even with lower end CPUs best to have 8-16gb of RAM and an SSD for best possible experience. If those are your current specs...watching the graphs will give you an idea where money can be put to have the performance change.

Real work example, the notebook I use Lightroom CC on has a i7-6600U, 16gb RAM and SSD. Watching the graphs shows me that the sluggishness I experience with Lightroom processing is that my CPU and the lackluster GPU capabilities are my performance bottleneck.