I have been watching youtube videos on increasing RAM by taking it from hard drive? I have Windows XP and just downloaded CS4 and have only 1GB RAM. Is it safe?
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I have been watching youtube videos on increasing RAM by taking it from hard drive? I have Windows XP and just downloaded CS4 and have only 1GB RAM. Is it safe?
I can only surmise (hope?) that the youtube video is referring to "virtual memory", which is a technique built into the OS - nothing for you to do anyway. (If not, I'd ignore it entirely.) When a program or its data doesn't fit in real physical RAM, something (part of the program or data or other programs) gets copied to disk and the RAM it was using is made available to the program that needed more space. It can slow things down enormously (in really bad cases, which I've experienced, it slows down by a factor of more than 10,000, or just grinds to a complete halt).Quote:
Originally Posted by Joanna Trescott
1 GB is pretty small these days. If you're using a desktop machine (laptop RAM is much more expensive) I strongly encourage you to upgrade to 2 or better yet 3GB. 4GB would be even better (I have 4GB in my desktop, with 3GB allocated to applications), but to make use of anything above 2GB, you have to change a startup parameter on XP, and not all video cards are compatible. If your video card turns out not to be compatible with that setting, you've wasted your money. And the usual first indication of incompatibility is either failure to boot or system instability (random crashes).Quote:
I have Windows XP and just downloaded CS4 and have only 1GB RAM.
Not sure what you're referring to. Running CS4 in 1GB of RAM will work, it'll just get really slow as your file gets bigger. Personally, I wouldn't act on anything from youtube; I don't consider it a reliable source of information.Quote:
Is it safe?
THanks again, Chris. I will check with a local computer guy to find out what I need on my laptop. CS4 is very slow with 1GB RAM.
Check out this site for ram. I have used them quite a few times to upgrade my RAM or for my friends. As far as the actual install of the memory module it's a piece of cake. Always install in matched pairs. Therefore if you want to upgrade to 2GB purchase 2GB and discard the one currently running in your machine or instability issues could arise.
If your funds allow install the max. your machine will allow.
http://www.crucial.com/
The other thing to note is that photoshop ships with a configuration that uses only half of available RAM. So let's say you have 2 Gigs and the operating system takes up 0.6 GB. You then have 1.4 GB available, and photoshop will only use 0.7 GB. If you are doing heavy photoshop work, you can close unnecessary applications and configure photoshop to use more memory (I use 90%). Photoshop will then work much faster.
See the preferences to change the memory settings.
Roger
