OldBlueGenes
daredevil_keiji
RAM can technically only give a small boost. Your best option to see a very cost effective performance boost is still using an SSD over a mechanical disk drive.
Even an inexpensive ssd with less than half the storage that I need is going to set me back $100 - $200. Also, as I understand it, a drive is only going to really boost the loading of applications and startup. Those aren't exactly speedy, but they don't bother me much. Of course, a solid state drive will help with the speed of virtual memory, but if I have more RAM, won't I be having to use virtual memory
less?
Well, when you stated your computer needed a "boost", it was kind of a broad term, so I assumed start-up times, data retrieval etc.
You gotta realize too that if your currently running applications exceed the current limit of your RAM, it uses the Paging File to make up the difference, with a currently mechanical drive, it is significantly slower to read/write than your RAM. So in essence, a paging file within an SSD is still better than a paging file in a mechanical drive in the strict terms of performance.
But of course I'm getting a bit deeper there, if you are sure that the culprit is that your RAM capacity is frequently hitting limits, then of course additional RAM would be a suitable solution.
Also, SSDs have gone down in price in the past few months. What most people do is use that as the primary boot/app drive then store all the data in a separate mechanical drive.
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My biggest problem seems to be when trying to do multiple things at once like have Word open and watch a youtube video OR god forbid I have a flash game running. Serious lag there. And OMG my anti-virus updating...ugh. Also when I check my memory usage it is regularly pushing its way up to my 2GB limit. Haven't 100% ruled out the possibility of a memory leak, but I don't think that's it. I also don't think a virus is eating up my memory since I clean installed Win 8 only a month or so ago. I realize upgrading my 32-bit OS to 4GB of RAM is only going to really allow me access to 3.2 GB of memory, but I figure its got to help some, right?
Memory leaks isn't as huge of a problem with most modern applications since they are tested for that upon release. An additional 2GB should give you more headroom which means it should be able to support more applications currently open before slowing down.
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I'd really like an SSD, and I aim to get one on my next PC, but I don't think its going to give me immediate relief. Could be wrong, though. Thoughts?
As stated above, it boils down to your paging file, in terms of performance, an SSD is significantly faster than a standard mechanical drive, so data derived from an SSD paging file is still faster than a data derived from the paging file of a mechanical drive. For your purpose though, just buy the extra 2GB, considering it is under $50 for a solution.
Trust me, once you've seen how fast everything loads and gets retrieved on an SSD, you will likely never go back to a mechanical drive.
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