System Building

About six months ago I purchased a new desktop.  I wanted Vista for DX10 and after considering a few performance issues, I decided that 64-bit would be a wise choice.  Why 64-bit?  It was so that I could max out the RAM.  The theoretical maximum for a 32-bit machine is 4GB, but Windows will only make use of 3GB of that.  64-Bit is limited only by the slots on your motherboard. Flash forward to five months later and I was still running it off the 2GB of RAM that it came with.  Yesterday, after much procrastination, I went to the store and picked up a 2GB pack for about $60. I considered going for 6GB, but then talked myself down to 4GB; it turned out to be plenty..

The hardest part about installing the RAM was figuring out how to get my case open. I have a wide full tower case that gives plenty of room to work on the system.  Once I got the case open, it was a twenty second operation to put the fresh RAM into my machine.  I actually expended less energy on this upgrade than I did swapping DVI cords for my monitor.

Firing up my machine, I did not notice too many changes.  Boot times did not alter drastically; not that I had expected them too.  The improvements came when programs loaded.  I typically have a lot of stuff open.  I usually have at least two instances of Firefox, sometimes running upwards of ten tabs in each.  Add to that, MS Word, Photoshop, Excel and Acrobat and yet get a fairly heavy system environment.  My machine could handle the load on 2GB, but it would move like molasses under the strain.  Now, I am able to do all that and create a disk image at the same time.  Flicking between applications is instantaneous; the machine really came to life.

For noobie system builders and those that have never tried, I will put a How To Install RAM post up this evening or tomorrow.