ram is the best thing that happened to eb

[Vasiliyi]

Ok guys (and gals), I just have to tell u how wonderful ram is. I cut my waiting time for eb by more than half! (I went from 1 gig to 2) I mean it is the best (and cheapest) investment I've made for my computer. 1 gig of ram for 30 bucks! Pm me if ur looking for the deals..

[Africanvs]

Yeah 1 gig to 2 gigs in an enormous improvement in speed. Enjoy your new performance. :)

[fenix3279]

Does having 3 improve the performance at all. I already have 2 but I would like it to run faster if possible.

[LorDBulA]

No. Nothing noticeable.

[Hax]

Well, a lot of computers can't run 3, and for EB there's not really a difference, I believe (I have 3 myself). Best thing you could do is get a better processor.

[Tellos Athenaios]

I guess you were mixing numbers up?

Certain programs may not be able to address all of >2 Gb or RAM; but certainly any remotely modern processor would be more than well equipped to handle 3 of 'em.

>3,5 is where it get's difficult.

Let me explain: 32bit processor basically means a processor which is able to recognise up to 2^32 unique memory cells, usually octets or bytes (8 bits of memory; though IIRC 6 has been in use as well). This means that the processor accepts addresses with 32bit length from the outside world, and can in fact use them provided that programs offer them.

Hence, in theory, you could stick in 2^32 bytes or equivalently 4Gigabyte* of memory on your PC and still have each single byte be addressed. However this idea of 32bit processors isn't exactly anything new: first of them were around when your OS would be capable of using 16bit addresses only (MS DOS). And no program ever needed that much memory therefore that much addressing space anyways.

However, by using the least significant bits (in the number 1027, 7 is the least significant digit; in the binary number 10000000011, the last 1 is the least significant bit) as 'checksum' and 'access rights' bits you could still make some valuable use of those otherwise 'redundant' bits. This was usually for the CPU only and used to prevent unauthorized access of data (to protect the OS against unauthorized changes; or to prevent a program crash demolishing your OS as well), and also to detect corrupted data in the RAM.

Eventually programs did start to use such amounts of RAM (RTW + EB ). And therefore the processors of the 80*86 architecture (and incidentally the type of many 'modern' processors: if you ever downloaded some software and you had to choose the "x86" version then, well need I say more?) came with a neat trick to allow the processor to use 48bit addresses 'under the hood'; whilst accepting only 32bits from the outside. So, the CPU could now offer much more RAM coverage; and still keep the control bits. The result is that about 3,5 Gb (not sure whether that's in metric units, btw) can be used by your average 32bit processor today.

Now, 64bit processors can -obviously- 'recognise' much more RAM; but in order to be able to use the processor to the full you need an OS which can handle 64bits. Which means: upgrading your processor from 32bit to 64bit won't take any effect until you upgrade your OS as well. (Some 64bit processors may be able to run a 32bit emulation, though; and tend to come a bit faster anyways. But it's sort of wasted money till you get your 64bit OS...) Getting a new OS, of course, means also re-installing virtually everything on your PC.

* : Note that one kilobyte is for the 'binary' nature of computer-operations conventionally equated with 2^10 (= 1024) bytes; but for sales-reasons companies often keep up the metric convention (= 1000 bytes).
Similarly one Megabyte is either 2^20 = 1024^2 (= 1048576) bytes; or in sales it's just 1 million of them. And one Gigabyte is hence 2^30 = 1024^3 (= 1073741824 bytes); or just 1 billion of them. Which means depending on the manufacturer you might have considerably less than one 1 Gb on a 1 Gb 'stick'. In fact some 70 Megabytes is probably enough to run most day-to-day (save for the EB-junkie, of course ) applications such as webbrowsers, simple text editors (Notepad, MS Word 97), and basic picture editing programs such as Irfanview and MS Paint.

[AqD]

Yeah 1 gig to 2 gigs in an enormous improvement in speed. Enjoy your new performance. :)

Not for me. I have 2.5gb RAM and FX6200 with 256MB video ram, but EB is still awfully slow

[LorDBulA]

Actually i think memory that can be use on 32 bit system is around 3.7GB (this is for mainboard memory and graphic card memory altogether )

Anyway nice explanation.

[Maion Maroneios]

I got 2.5gb RAM and it's quite fast, compared to other people's threads complaining about loading time taking minutes to finish.

[Uranos]

Not for me. I have 2.5gb RAM and FX6200 with 256MB video ram, but EB is still awfully slow

Try client ruler script optimization:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=103645
it's an awesome thing

[mcantu]

Vista SP1 (32 bit) now allows 4GB of memory to be recognized. This does not mean that all applications will be able to access it however...

[Ravenfeeder]

SP1 'recognises' 4Gb RAM. Unfortunately it can still only use 3.2Gb of that RAM. It's just a cosmetic change. 64bit is still the way to go for lots of RAM. Unfortunately most applications are still writen and compiled for 32bit systems so they cannot access more than the 3.2Gb per application.

[Korlon]

Not for me. I have 2.5gb RAM and FX6200 with 256MB video ram, but EB is still awfully slow

The video card's bottlenecking your RAM's performance most likely.

Anyways, three gigs probably won't help that much. If I alt tab out of EB, I see that the max amount of ram that I use is generally around 1.2 gigs, which should be perfectly fine for a gigabyte RAM system. Three gigabytes won't give you much noticeable change I would guess.

[Puupertti Ruma]

Also the speed of the memory has an impact on the performance. When your computer's RAM isn't enough to handle all the open processes, it starts using your hard disk drive. Hard disk drive is, what, 50 times slower than RAM? So if you have enough RAM to handle all the processes your computer does, adding more wouldn't do anything. Only if that RAM would be faster than the old one, it would have an effect on performance.

[Tellos Athenaios]

HD is much, much slower than RAM: we're talking nanoseconds versus miliseconds! And you don't accidentally miss the 'bus' so to speak: you will have to find a file first on your HD (it's physical position) then get the reading equipment adjusted to read from the particular 'lines'; and finally you need to wait until the beginning is 'under' the 'reading tip'. With good RAID systems the problem is somewhat less (stuff can be read from multiple tips at the same time; from phyiscally different HD's --> in fact RAID means duplicate HD to increase read/write speed; but mostly to ensure persistency in case of hardware failure).

And actually CPU's also use another, yet even faster type of memory than RAM --> TLB (Translation Lookup Buffer: used to translate page/segment and similar addresses into phyiscal RAM addresses; which in turn serves as a safety layer as well as help memory management (optimize for frequently used pages/segments)...) and processor cache. But that stuff is so insanely expensive you can't make decent amounts of RAM from it and expect to find enough buyers to make a profit. The key is much more parallel look up and read/write operations; as well as the associative 'behaviour' of the electronics.

[Xurr]

The video card's bottlenecking your RAM's performance most likely.

Anyways, three gigs probably won't help that much. If I alt tab out of EB, I see that the max amount of ram that I use is generally around 1.2 gigs, which should be perfectly fine for a gigabyte RAM system. Three gigabytes won't give you much noticeable change I would guess.

Actually my first thought was other software running. For PCs its usually Malware. I find that a lot of people end up with tons of Malware and machines that crawl instead of run. Its either that or they tend to install every silly toolbar or junkware that comes along. I've seen computers with 20+ items in the systray and people wonder why their computer is running slow.

Here are some tips to help improve your computers performance:

Uninstall all those toolbars and junkware programs running in the systray. Delete your internet files if you use Iexplorer and get firefox with noscript and adblock.

Get a good anti spyware program (my favorite is spyware doctor from pctools.com), run it and then close it when you are done. I find running it once a week is generally sufficient and it isn't necessary to run it full time in the background.

Also defrag your hard drive once every couple of weeks at a bare minimum.