then you arent doing much on your comp & hopefully you are just kidding.
i assume you are running xp. xp, unless you turn of lots of services & dont have any progs on your system that load with windows- like drivers, virus & malware prot, and any number of other things that can of course be disabled from startup, will take up 30-40% of that ram just being on. now if all your doing is word proccessing & browsing the internet you are probably fine. but if u use any sort of app that requires any mem usage & have your page file turned of-there is absolutely no legit reason to do this- make the size fixed, yes(xp isnt that great at manging pagefile size) but turning it of makes no sense whatsoever- you are getting slowdowns.
i have seen this claim many times & it always turns out the person doesnt do hardly anything on their comp &/or just doesnt know how to recognise slow downs due to win not having enough mem let alone pagefile.
just so im not misunderstood, 2 gig is fine on any comp that isnt doing anything very intensive. having pagefile turned of under any circumstance(even if u got 12 gig ram u still want some sort of pagefile) is ill-advised & has no legit reason whatsoeveri know this post may sound like some sort of personal attack, it isnt. like i said above, i have run into this type of thing many times, & the person doing it is usually mis-informed(98%) or stupid. i know you are definetly not the second:).
bty, if you are happy with your comps perf, no worries.
to answer your question, i game a lot & do some occasional photo editing. if you are doing anything besides basic tasks you cant have to much ram. you may have more than you really need, but that causes no problems, not having enough does cause problems.
os still being 32 bit is ridiculous, this were most of peoles misunderstanding of ram comes from. 32 bit win can only address around 3.4 gigs(this amount can vary between 3.3-3.6 depending on who u talk to), this also includes any meem on your vid card. so u can see where people going from 2 gig ram to gig ram generally get little perf boost. i stayed with 2gig until i went 64 bit.
the other thing that people get confused on is - if you have a lot of ram windows wont use pagefile- this was never true in 32 bit win(for reasons stated above) & isnt true in vista64 or win7 64. the os will definetly use pagefile a LOT less with more ram(meaning yopu can manualy set your pagefile to a much smaller fixed size), but it will use it sometimes regardless of how much ram you have. & there are programs like photoshop were u HAVE to have pagefile no matter how much ram u have.
bottom line, as long as your os can address it, you can never have to much ram- within the context of what you do with your comp of course;)
