Would extra RAM help me out?

[Ruahrc]

I have some extra money saved up, and as things always are, there are more things that I can buy with this money than I have money to buy them hehe.

Anyways, I currently have 256MB RAM running W98SE. Since RAM is so cheap nowadays I was thinking of upping to 512MB- but I remember reading that W98SE isn't much different running 512MB RAM as opposed to 256. So if the OS wouldn't really like it, would games perform drastically better?

Other options for the money would be to contribute towards a Geforce3, either that or I have been eyeing this Ham Radio lately.... http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

Bottom line though- buying 256 MB more RAM wouldn't really be a smart move unless I had tons of extra money to throw around right? Oh and I do not really intend to go to W2k or WinXP so take that into account.

Ruahrc

P.S. Just so nobody gets on top of soapboxes... Don't get me started on putting it in the bank http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif It's been there long enough.

[GroundZero3]

woulnd't use it for more ram. your right about the limits on the win9x kernel. what vid card you have now?

Jason

[Bovon]

Unless you sre gonna run some big time games, 256 mb is a pretty good figure. More ram is always good, and I dont know about the Win98 thing, so..no comment there...but


Some new ham radio stuff always made me feel good! http://www.sysopt.com/forum/biggrin.gif

[Mortis]

Actually, investing your money in high market blah blah blah, or a high yield... hehe, seriously- I dont think you would notice much dif in system performance between 256 and 512. Depends on how and what you use your system for... aside from upgrading vid, you could look at slowly building your dream machine (ofcourse, by time you are done- you will have another dream). Do you game? If you do, a new vid would def be an improvement depending on what you currently have. Otherwise, buy a mobo and processor than start to "accessorize" toward that dream machine. I am currently doing the same thing... my 400 celery is too slow for my games- so slowly building new as I can afford... goodluck!

Mortis

[Nighthawk]

I didn't see any performance increase when I went from 256 to 512 in WinME, so you definitely wouldn't see anything in 98SE.

Even Win2K I constantly have upwards of 300MB of physical RAM free.

[Axel]

One very quick way to increase the performance of a windows 9x system is to upgrade the hard drive once you've already got 256mb of RAM.

Pull out the motherboard manual and see what the limits of the board are -

Any modern IDE board will usually run ATA drives - so even if your IDE bus isn't rated for , say , an ATA66 drive - you can get a really good EIDE/ATA66 drive for $80 to $95 -

You want to look for something with more RPM's and more on-board cache memory on the drive. I like the Quantum fireball series of drives and prefer a 7200 RPM drive with a 2MB on-board cache.... That will make a difference on most systems....

If you want to boost your system performance now before you upgrade operating systems ( and by the way - many things running in win98 don't on win2k ) I'm put my money on a new hard drive.

[Ruahrc]

Thanks for the reply. I was pretty sure about the memory but wanted to make certain. My current specs (quick and dirty) are:

Tbird 1000
A7V
256 RAM
20.5 5400 HDD
GF2MX 32MB
SBLive

I think I'm going to save up for a GF3. Either that or if hard drives go on sale I might hop up to a 7200rpm one.

Ruahrc

[SiteCharts.com]

Or wait till you see a slick new toy you just have to have ;-)