"Bob Engelhardt" wrote in message
...
RBnDFW wrote:
Steve B wrote:
... Bumped up RAM to 2 GB, and hooey, what a difference. ...

Yessir, RAM is like some other things, you just can't have too much.

I consider 2 GB a minimum now, Win XP and above.

Thanks for the tip. I had 1/2G, added another 1G ($55, Amazon). My
wife's PC, too. From 256MB (!) to 1G.

She noticed a BIG difference, but I didn't. So I went poking around the
'net & found this free MS utility ("Process Explorer") that monitors
memory usage:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896653.aspx

To my surprise, I have not seen any memory use above 600MB. I've opened a
number of app's simultaneously, including Adobe Photoshop Elements and MS
Excel, which I had thought were real memory pigs. They added very little
to the usage.

So I'm wondering what uses a lot of memory. Maybe data, like pix & music.
But if MP3 is, say, 2MB/minute, I'd have to have hours of music IN MEMORY,
to get up to a total of 1G. Raw music takes more, but still ... Likewise
pix - I'd have to be working on hundreds of them simultaneously.

Well, then, video. The little video I have is low res (640 x 480) AVI. It
ranges from .1M to 1.1M per second. So if I were editing a 10 minute
clip, it would need 60 - 660MB to keep it in memory. So, I tried it on a
100MB clip - it didn't keep it memory (usage only went up about 30MB).

So, I dunno. Anybody know why a lot of memory might be needed?

Thanks,
Bob

Some systems do not automatically recognize the extra memory. You may have
to go into setup to get it in to the system.