Originally Posted By: Bottom_Feeder
Originally Posted By: Hokiefyd
It has 4 GB, which is the maximum according to the Dell product information. But some with my same hardware report that 8 GB does work.
Unless you are doing a lot of multitasking, 4gb is the sweet spot for Win7 64-bit. For general use, you probably wouldn't notice it if it had more.
That said, DDR3 memory is ridiculously cheap nowadays so maxing out a system just to future-proof it a bit is probably worth it.
And with THAT said, your system probably uses DDR2 which isn't so cheap, hence my 4gb recommendation.
Yes, my system uses DDR2.
I defragged the disk last night. And performance is a ton better, just from that. Windows 7's defragger reported it at 20% fragmented during the analysis, and it took about 2 hours to complete the task. But it seems to load a bit faster now, and performance is much better once loaded.
Office applications open with a snap of the finger, even for the first time since being installed. What's most impressive to me (and don't ask me the reason, I don't really know) is the list of applications in the "Uninstall a program" control panel is loaded almost instantaneously. With XP, the HDD would churn for 3-4 seconds while that list loaded. On the Dell netbook with the Intel Atom, it takes fully 10-12 seconds for that list to load.
What's interesting is Microsoft Security Essentials takes only 4.2 MB of system memory under Windows 7, at least according to the Task Manager. Under XP, it would take 50-60 MB looking at the same Task Manager. I wonder if the difference is the 64-bit vs. 32-bit. The reason I wonder that is I understand that some of the security features can be handled by the hardware when using a 64-bit OS?
Originally Posted By: Hokiefyd
It has 4 GB, which is the maximum according to the Dell product information. But some with my same hardware report that 8 GB does work.
Unless you are doing a lot of multitasking, 4gb is the sweet spot for Win7 64-bit. For general use, you probably wouldn't notice it if it had more.
That said, DDR3 memory is ridiculously cheap nowadays so maxing out a system just to future-proof it a bit is probably worth it.
And with THAT said, your system probably uses DDR2 which isn't so cheap, hence my 4gb recommendation.
Yes, my system uses DDR2.
I defragged the disk last night. And performance is a ton better, just from that. Windows 7's defragger reported it at 20% fragmented during the analysis, and it took about 2 hours to complete the task. But it seems to load a bit faster now, and performance is much better once loaded.
Office applications open with a snap of the finger, even for the first time since being installed. What's most impressive to me (and don't ask me the reason, I don't really know) is the list of applications in the "Uninstall a program" control panel is loaded almost instantaneously. With XP, the HDD would churn for 3-4 seconds while that list loaded. On the Dell netbook with the Intel Atom, it takes fully 10-12 seconds for that list to load.
What's interesting is Microsoft Security Essentials takes only 4.2 MB of system memory under Windows 7, at least according to the Task Manager. Under XP, it would take 50-60 MB looking at the same Task Manager. I wonder if the difference is the 64-bit vs. 32-bit. The reason I wonder that is I understand that some of the security features can be handled by the hardware when using a 64-bit OS?
