03 Dec 09 How to Know That You Need More RAM

Written by: bikram

The price of RAM has significantly gone down, which makes many people go for more RAM in their system. Moreover, they do it even without thinking if they actually need more RAM in their system. The truth is not many of us know how much RAM they need, therefore, I thought of writing this brief guide to tell you how much RAM do you need in your system.

What will happen if I upgrade RAM?

Well, if you are hoping to change your world by increasing the amount of RAM your system has then I am sorry to break the bad news, it is not going to happen. No matter how much RAM you put in ( I am talking here in GBs, may be more than 4), your application will be only so much faster.

More RAM helps in multi-tasking, particularly if you are using memory-hogs like Photoshop, Outlook, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Aftereffect, 3D Max, or Firefox with too many tabs.
If you have more memory, you can more swiftly switch open the open applications without sacrificing the speed.
Increasing RAM will not make any “one application” faster; rather it will help you do more things at once. You can have more memory-hogging application open at one time, if you get 8GB of RAM instead of 4GB.
More RAM will affect the performance of image editing software, video editing and special effect software, virtual machine, etc.

How much RAM do you need?

This depends upon your PC usage pattern. If you barely use your PC, or open just one application at one time, and you are running 32-bit Windows 7 then 2GB RAM will do, and if you are still running Windows XP then for you 1GB is sufficient (please no question on Vista, I hate that bugger). But, if you are a power user, and run many applications simultaneously, and keep 70-80 tabs open across your browsers (for me it runs sometimes in 100 across all 5 browsers that I keep open all time, and yes it does not include Internet explorer) then you will need 3 to 4GB of RAM.

I recommend having 3GB at least for average user and 6GB for power users if you are using 64-bit operating system (OS). In case, you are using 32-bit version of Windows (XP, 7 or even vista) then do not bother having more than 4GB RAM, your OS will not recognize it.