Increasing Vista Performance with extra RAM

Iain Laskey investigates the speed gains you can expect with 4GB of RAM

Vista has gained a reputation for being somewhat RAM hungry. Whilst many systems are sold with 'just' 1GB, Vista really likes at least 2GB to work with any real speed on most systems, especially laptops where the slower hard drives impact overall performance. Our Vista test machine normally sports 2GB. We decided to see what difference it made upping this to 4GB.

We were kindly supplied with 2 x 2GB sticks of RAM by Crucial (www.crucial.com/uk) to assist with this article. Crucial make it easy to find the right RAM as their web site features an online tool that scans your PC and advises which options would suit your system and makes recommendations for the best choices.

As we were running 32bit Vista, our system was only able to use 3.5Gb of the 4GB (see Vista 32bit memory for more information). If you're running 64bit Vista, you'll get the benefit of the full 4GB.

Testing

We performed a number of tasks with 2GB then repeated these with 4GB. We timed how long it took for a cold boot, starting from sleep mode and then launching various programs. The latter was done twice to see how much Vista was able to cache from the previous run.

The results were certainly compelling. Overall boot time improved from 2:05 to 1:20 - quite a substantial difference. We also timed how long the various stages of a boot took such as the appearance of the anti-virus splash screen, the sidebar and so on. The initial boot to login prompt was surprisingly similar but the later stages and loading of the various startup items really showed the value of the extra RAM.

We then loaded various applications including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Ameol, Thunderbird and Dreamweaver. We typically saw a 15 to 25% improvement on initial load and then a more impressive 30-35% improvement on subsequent runs.

Now, startup time is all very good but realistically, doesn't actually make a huge difference to most people. If you're about to write a report for the next 2 hours, a few seconds saved firing up Word is neither here nor there. What is far more important is the overall system response. Without exhaustive structured testing, this is going to have to be a purely subjective thing. What we did find was that the extra RAM did seem to make a very real difference. Dialog boxes seemed snappier, the control panel populated more quickly and the pauses when opening file dialogs or Windows Explorer seemed less intrusive. The entire system just felt smoother and more pleasant to use.

It was interesting to note that Vista's own performance index was unchanged but then that is to be expected unless faster RAM is used. It does however highlight how this index often bears little resemblance to real life performance.

Finally, we found a 15% improvement in going in and out of sleep mode. On laptops with aggressive battery saving settings that do this after only a few minutes of inactivity, this can be a useful improvement to the overall working experience.

Conclusion

You might think 1 or 2GB is a lot of RAM for a PC (and for those of us who started back when 4MB was considered pretty impressive,it's truly massive) but clearly, when it comes to Vista, a worthwhile boost to your system can be had by upping that further. On previous Microsoft desktop OS's, the sweet spot for RAM was typically around the 1GB region with additional RAM not adding much more to the performance and in some cases, actually slowing things down. Vista is clearly somewhat different and makes real use of as much RAM as it can get. If you feel your PC could so with some extra help with Vista, get over to www.crucial.com/uk run the scanner tool and see how little it can cost to max out your RAM. Pimp out that PC!

Iain Laskey
See Iain's site at www.pcbookreview.com