More memory, how does it help?

[gll99]

I visited my local friendly neighbourhood PC man the other day and bought a new HD. While there I asked about mem prices. About 15 months ago I bought a single 512mb (DDR333 / PC2700) piece for my P4 1.6 and paid $249 canadian. Now I can buy the same stick for $85 can.

Great deal, except that my rep said to save my money since he figures that I don't need it. He said with XP it may help a bit by allowing me to load more apps concurrently but if I am running win98 it would not help at all. (I run winxp and at times win98 on this PC since I kept my dual boot).

What do you think. This is my play computer, my main areas of interest are primarily video capture, editing, followed by vcd and svcd creation (mainly frameserver, vdub and tmpgenc) and then occasionaly backing up my DVD's.

Would 1024 mem help with those functions or not. If yes, how?

Thanks

[jacknjt]

i think it always help with extra memory. with 512mb is not enough if u have a lot of applications on at the same time. with 1024 then u dont have to worry about anything. it does help, u can buy from a local store they have a 30days return policy if u see no performance boost then return it.

[sterno]

More memory can help with video editing. I'm not sure how much benefit you'll get going beyond 512MB in Windows, though, it usually does a poor job of utilizing very large amounts of memory.

[RoopeT]

Windows 98 doesn't support more than 512 Mb of memory. You will get error massages if you try to boot with more memory. However, there's a way disabling the extra memory in Win98 (I just cannot remember how), so your XP system could use all of the available 1024 mb of memory while nothing changes in Win98

[mrtristan]

I had problems with more than 512MB of memory with 98se. I had to tweak a setting in the registry to allow windows to use 1024MB. Sorry, I can't remember what it was. The limit to what 98 can handle without tweaking that registry setting is 768MB.

I would save the money and spend it on beer, or something that's really useful. Seriously, you won't notice a large increase in performance. I tried encoding with 512MB and 1024MB of RAM in my older machine and the difference came out to seconds, for a 30 minute clip.

As it was previously mentioned, your system will be more responsive if you have multiple applications running. Other than that, you won't notice much of a difference.

[gll99]

Looks like he guided me right.

My PC reseller must be in it for the long haul. He could have made a few $ on me but told me the truth instead. Now he has my future upgrade business guaranteed.

I will probably sell my board , cpu and ram early next year and go for the p4 2.+ or 3g. I would have likely upgraded the ram anyways at that time.
He suggested that I sell them as a package deal to get the best price.

Makes sense. That extra ram probably would have been a throw-in on the resell. I wouldn't get a better price with it in the system.

Thanks guys (gals) for responding. I'll stay with my 512 for now.

PS:
I'm much more confident in the compatibility of XP with most of my apps. I find myself booting back to win98se less and less as time goes on. I do miss the vfw capture drivers on some apps (e.g. vdub) since the wdm to vfw wrapper is so restrictive (at least with my avermedia TV98 card) but that's about the only thing. So far XP has proven superior in all other areas.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Encoding audio or video is CPU intensive and RAM has very little to do with it.More RAM(>256MB)is useful if you multi-task or run a server.
To the question of >512MB RAM in Win9x,you have to limit the vcache to 512MB(msconfig->System.ini->vcache add this string "MaxFileCache=524288").

[Faustus]

Yes more then 512ram in 98 can actually CAUSE problems, plus until some of the more recent (last few years) chip sets many boards would read the memory but not use it very well itself. Nowdays however if your board supports it and your running 2k/XP I seriously suggest 512+ Ram, its not really going to affect your encode times greatly unless your current machine is RAM starved. Sadly because of a Piece of dead ram recently I'm back at 512mb.