Why anyone would need more than that on a desk/lap top is beyond me.
Video editing consumes an unbelievable amount of memory. 16GB is easily consumed with larger projects.
Question about RAM
Author
Here's your CPU and based on what I see it's a 64-bit processor which means you have the minimum for it at 2GB of RAM. When it starts "lagging" a little the OS (assuming Windows) is caching to the hard drive. If you have a 64-bit OS and vid card then you can go as high as 8GB. Why anyone would need more than that on a desk/lap top is beyond me. 64 bit means it can address a memory location in ram as high as 7FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF or 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 and that's a whole lot of bytes!
It is a 32 bits Windows XP laptop. Doh should have said that too. The reason I said it is 32 bits is because I remember I needed to use the 32 bit version of the Eclipse IDE.
On a side note: Why is x86 means 32 bits and x64 means 64 bits?
It is a 32 bits laptop. The reason I said it is 32 bits is because I remember I needed to use the 32 bit version of the Eclipse IDE
Your CPU uses a 64-bit instruction set, as can be seen if you click the link.
32-bit applications will obviously still work on 64-bit architectures, they're just limited to 4GiB of RAM.
On a side note: Why is x86 means 32 bits and x64 means 64 bits?
Here's for you to read up on the x86 family; clicky. In short, x86 is the whole family of CPUs from many years ago, and x86-64, commonly denotes as x64, are the 64-bit CPUs in the x86 family.
Why anyone would need more than that on a desk/lap top is beyond me.
Video editing consumes an unbelievable amount of memory. 16GB is easily consumed with larger projects.
Heh, I recall editing PAL videos (which is what... 576i or something?) with a machine that had 256MB (which was a lot at that time!) and a 3x14GB RAID. Which was mixing and encoding at roughly 5-8 times real time, and 100% CPU bound. 
Oh the good old times, wait 3-4 minutes to get a low-res preview every time you change something.
But yeah, I can see how you'd easily get I/O bound and need huge amounts of buffer space nowadays with GPU-backed encoders and multi-core machines.
With that said, putting extra RAM into a computer (laptop or any other) is the single best thing you can do. That, and a SSD.
Why anyone would need more than that on a desk/lap top is beyond me.
The default memory load of my work system (MSVC with the relevant projects opened, browser and a few other tools) clocks out at just under 4GB of used memory. Add a virtual machine or two running and suddenly 8GB does not sound like so much, especially if you want enough breathing space to do something demanding like compiling a largish complex library on four or eight cores.
More than 8GB of RAM is not something a lot of people get a use out of, but it's far from unbelievable.
i use 16GB at work and i run out from time to time, its not difficult to run out of RAM on a developer machine,i hardly ever close applications, i just swap to a new virtual desktop when i switch project leaving everything(IDEs, browsers, VMs, editors, etc) related to the previous project up and running. (Makes quick fixes/changes in old projects alot faster). More RAM = higher productivity. (a few extra CPU cores is extremely useful as well)
This topic is closed to new replies.
Advertisement
Popular Topics
Advertisement
