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.

 

[edispics]

You need to get the Resource Monitor up and running to monitor memory use while the user goes through a normal workload, running typical applications, not at idle.

When Win runs low on mem it starts paging. When it starts paging, performance goes down the tubes. If the pagefile disk is a spinner, it is even worse.

You can also use the Resource Monitor to see if there is activity against the Windows pagefiles.

 

[Sean Nelson]

I'm helping someone with a computer issue. They are complaining about a slow performing computer.

Open task manager and click on the "Performance" tab. If there isn't a series of small graphs on the left side showing CPU, memory, disk, etc. then right-click on that area and select "Show Graphs". Then watch the graphs as your use does whatever it is that he finds is slow. Whichever graphs max out will most likely be a good indication of the bottleneck.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that the disks are very busy. It's not how full they are that matters, it's whether or not they are fast enough to keep up with all the requests from the system. If a disk does look to be the issue then replacing it with an SSD would be the most obvious solution.

 

[Simon97]

Yes, I should have mentioned this. This is how I determined the memory usage. It was around 2.5GB give or take. Hard drive light blinks now and then.

I remember back in the day when memory was more costly and computers were pushed more to the limit. When ram ran out and windows started paging to the HDD, the computer pretty much became unusable. The HDD light was on solid.

 

[edispics]

What are the applications the person is running when the PC slows.

 

[Bunjo]

My experience (with laptops and PCs) is that more memory rarely makes a noticeable difference. Replacing the hard drive with a SATA SSD makes a good improvement. Replacing the hard drive with a PCIe M2 SSD (if you have the socket) makes an outstanding difference.

 

[tkbslc]

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.

Memory is like hard drive space in that you only benefit from space you use. If the peak memory usage well under 4GB, with no plans for increased workload, then there is no benefit in upgrading.

Does this person have an SSD for their boot drive? Those are under $50 for 256GB and they do make a big difference over an HDD.

 

[bmoag]

Many people on this and the Mac forum on this web site are of the more is better persuasion regardless of the fact that unused ram, unused CPU cores etc do zilch.

If the computer boots from a hard drive chances are it is quite old,, possibly Core 2 duo.

If so the first thing slowing the computer is the hard drive. If running any version of Windows earlier than Win 10 defragmenting the hard drive might help no matter how much space is available. It can take a few hours.

A motherboard has to support the AHCI protocol over SATA in order to get an SSD to run at faster than hard drive speed. Not all Core 2 duo motherboards, particularly early ones, did that. If the motherboad supports AHCI but it is not activated if you activate AHCI the current copy of WIndows probably will not boot but you can easily look up how to fix this.

Then you would need to reinstall Windows, hopefully Win 10, to the new SSD and reinstall programs. The hard drive can be used for storage.

An SSD will improve even Core 2 Duo boot times but a slow old CPU is what it is. There is no point adding RAM if generally the user does not fill what is already there but that would help some, no more than 8gb total or its just throwing away money.

If the computer is Core 2 duo it would be wiser to put the money toward a more modern box. Just about anything on the shelf at Costco, Bestbuy et al will be faster (just make sure it boots from an SSD).

 

[tkbslc]

A motherboard has to support the AHCI protocol over SATA in order to get an SSD to run at faster than hard drive speed.

Not true at all. AHCI is better, but you will still get a massive increase in random I/O performance even in IDE mode. And Random performance is what makes windows boot faster and feel snappy.

I upgraded an old Q6600 system with an SSD in IDE mode and it was most definitely miles ahead of the HDD it replaced for day-to-day use. AHCI benchmarks a lot better because it is better at handling multiple streams of data, but in the real world you don't need that for launching an app or opening a file.

If the computer is Core 2 duo it would be wiser to put the money toward a more modern box. Just about anything on the shelf at Costco, Bestbuy et al will be faster (just make sure it boots from an SSD).

SSD costs $40-50 and will make it tolerable for office and web use. If it buys you another year or 2 before a full upgrade, it's not money wasted.

 

[afterburn]

My experience (with laptops and PCs) is that more memory rarely makes a noticeable difference. Replacing the hard drive with a SATA SSD makes a good improvement. Replacing the hard drive with a PCIe M2 SSD (if you have the socket) makes an outstanding difference.

Don't know what gave you that idea, but the real world tells a different story. Adding ANY ssd to an existing system makes a MASSIVE difference. Changing from sata to nvme, not so much. Sure, the benchmarks look great at 3x the speed but in the real world unless you are transferring huge files between drives a lot, the difference doesn't even register. I should know, I made the switch from spinners to sata ssd back when and later from sata ssd to nvme ssd and was thoroughly disappointed as that pro series samsung nvme drive was rather expensive back then and while very very fast, you could only really tell when running benchmarks.

 

[Morris0]

Yes, I should have mentioned this. This is how I determined the memory usage. It was around 2.5GB give or take. Hard drive light blinks now and then.

I remember back in the day when memory was more costly and computers were pushed more to the limit. When ram ran out and windows started paging to the HDD, the computer pretty much became unusable. The HDD light was on solid.

In Task Manager on the performance tab, click Disk and it will show you the process that's doing all the IO. Address it. If search indexer windows updates are behind so update. Replace the hard disk with SSD will make the computer faster and IO will be much less of a bottelneck.

Morris

 

[Mystery member]

A motherboard has to support the AHCI protocol over SATA in order to get an SSD to run at faster than hard drive speed.

Not true at all. AHCI is better, but you will still get a massive increase in random I/O performance even in IDE mode. And Random performance is what makes windows boot faster and feel snappy.

I upgraded an old Q6600 system with an SSD in IDE mode and it was most definitely miles ahead of the HDD it replaced for day-to-day use. AHCI benchmarks a lot better because it is better at handling multiple streams of data, but in the real world you don't need that for launching an app or opening a file.

Agree.

I installed an SSD in an old Celeron machine, and the performance boost was startling. Much faster booting and applications loaded in a flash. Vista OS.

 

[calson]

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.

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.

 

[Sean Nelson]

Replacing the hard drive with a SATA SSD makes a good improvement. Replacing the hard drive with a PCIe M2 SSD (if you have the socket) makes an outstanding difference.

Don't know what gave you that idea, but the real world tells a different story. Adding ANY ssd to an existing system makes a MASSIVE difference. Changing from sata to nvme, not so much.

Totally agree. Going from SATA to NVMe only makes a difference if (a) the drive is capable of higher than SATA speeds (which is not true of most drives), and (b) the workload actually requires large bulk transfers (which is not true of most workloads).

Particularly on a system drive, the biggest benefit of SSDs by far is that they eliminate the latency caused by the hard disk having to move the access arm and then wait for the right data to come around and pass under the read head. You get 100% of that benefit no matter how you connect the SSD.

 

[tkbslc]

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.

By that logic, Mac is an ancient system because it is based on the Mach and BSD Kernels which were started in 1983 and 1977.

 

[Robert Zanatta]

NVMe SSDs have much lower latency than SATA SSD, which really improves IOPS at small queue depths. Optane really takes advantage of this.

 

[Bunjo]

Clearly our real world experience differs.

 

[Tmjc]

I think Windows 10 runs a bit faster with more Ram even if you don´t use all of it. I can remember when windows 10 launched that there was an outcry at how much Ram Windows utilized at idle operation. Apparently windows 10 loads more stuff into Ram if you have more (and therefore probably runs faster)
Right now I checked and my Pc idles at 4gb Ram utilization (I have 16gb installed)
However adding an SSD will make a bigger difference for sure.

 

[tkbslc]

NVMe SSDs have much lower latency than SATA SSD, which really improves IOPS at small queue depths. Optane really takes advantage of this.

It's rare that any typical home usage would exceed a few thousand IOPS. Even a plain SATA SSD can do that without sweating.

And what does any of this have to do with the OP's use case where they aren't even using 3GB of RAM? Does that sound like the type of high performance workload where 10 microseconds of latency is going to be felt?

 

[Robert Zanatta]

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