10 stupid things 'experts' try to tell you about Microsoft

In Silicon Valley (and in media satellites that take the NoCal mindset to New York and beyond), everyone has an iPhone, a MacBook Pro, and a Gmail account. Microsoft products and services might as well be from Mars. So be skeptical when you read analyses or predictions of what's coming next from Redmond.

Read more at: 10 amazingly stupid things the 'experts' will try to tell you about Microsoft | ZDNet

 

[ainteinstein]

Good point, MasterChief. Sometimes you do have to clarify for others who are reading this post. They might decide to over RAM, like putting a V8 on a tricycle.

 

[Lee]

That is true, and despite what MC says,, Ram upgrade/addition does improve stability and performance, up to a point.

It can improve performance under certain situations, but it cannot improve stability. Actually, it can lessen stability because many times, people add extreme amounts of RAM and that often needs special attention to settings that they have no clue how to deal with.

I'm perfectly happy with my 2 GB DDR2 - I could put it to 4 GB but don't really care either way, to be honest. It's fine as it is.

Then it must be obvious even to us average users (the ones who have no computer experience) that you are running a 32 bit system OS.

 

[Tepid]

MC, that is not entirely true. That would be a very small number of users that may be affected by that.
Mainly those who have no clue what they are doing. Installing mismatched ram, etc.

If you find someone experienced in this things, trust me, the right amount of Ram can and will provide more stability.
the majority of people will not have any issues at all with adding ram to their PC's.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
1) Music studio applications -- unless your hardware has its own controllers / memory trying to run studio quality music applications with 1GB RAM will certainly cause problems for very high quality recording - you will need a lot of RAM so much of the recording signal can be buffered to avoid "drop outs" -- while you could use HDD's for buffering - on older equipment these will be HIDEOUSLY slow -- actually even on an old computer putting in an SSD can make a HUGE difference in performance.

2) If you even THINK of running any VM's that have any sort of performance at all then you will need OODLES and OODLES of RAM. Virtual machines just eat RAM for breakfast.

3) if you only run a few small applications then fitting an SSD will probably be a much better option on an older machine than upping the RAM from say 1GB to 2GB - especially if its running XP. However these days RAM is relatively cheap so you don't lose by fitting more (although for a 32 bit OS more than 4GB is just a waste.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[MasterChief]

MC, that is not entirely true. That would be a very small number of users that may be affected by that.
Mainly those who have no clue what they are doing. Installing mismatched ram, etc.

If you find someone experienced in this things, trust me, the right amount of Ram can and will provide more stability.
the majority of people will not have any issues at all with adding ram to their PC's.

My previous post was deleted about this. All I can tell you is that there is no such thing as a BSOD happening due to (small) RAM amount. That is something that needs to be considered so facts can be straightened out in the name of correctness.

Jimbo, do you realize that you're posting that with me here - a person that ran a music studio very successfully for many years with 1 GB? There was nothing painful and nothing slow. What I needed to do got done. There were no dropout, buffering was not a problem, etc... Perfect I can say. I posted about this already in the thread - 192 KHz, 24 bit (32 bit mixing) - as many tracks as I want simultaneously, both wet and dry.

 

[Dorlan2001]

In most cases adding up more RAM DOES NOT improve performance or stability, but using better quality and faster RAM does improve it (a lot and of course if your motherboard can handle it). But the main reason of PC's using high quantities of RAM is because of poorly encoded/programmed software. Some software eats up RAM like a hungry dude will eat a box of pizza and some software doesn't... have have to decide which software is the best suited for you (functionality/features/compatibility/stability)!

 

[MasterChief]

In most cases adding up more RAM DOES NOT improve performance or stability, but using better quality and faster RAM does improve it (a lot and of course if your motherboard can handle it).

No about faster RAM. Tom's Hardware has many interesting articles about it. The only place you can see a difference is in actual RAM benchmarking. Real-world activities, many or most of them, literally show no difference in benchmarking.

Further, I have noticed over many years of BSOD debugging, that the systems with most problems are ones with RAM marketed as gaming or performance. So, unnecessarily harming own system stability in their attempts, thinking it was better, because marketing told them so.

Even further than that - there are instances where the high speed best performance WHOOOO HA RAM of company A actually performs less than their standard general population normal RAM. (same company)

From 2008: "Our conclusion is very simple: you get the best bang for the buck if you stick to the mainstream of the memory market, which currently is still DDR2-800 or 1066, preferably at low latencies. DDR3-1066 and -1333 memory do not yet result in better performance, and so should only be considered by hardcore enthusiasts, who aim for maximum overclocking performance knowing that they will get little benefit for spending a fortune."

Conclusion - Tom's Ultimate RAM Speed Tests

From 2013: "Still, the best reason we can think of to buy high-end memory is to show off a big overclock." <<< A nice way to say "not needed."

"Since high-speed memory only provides a marginal performance benefit to a small number of all the applications on your PC, we can only recommend the step up to a subset of enthusiasts willing to pay that extra money."

Making A Case For High-Speed RAM - Does High-Speed DDR3 Help AMD's FX? Four 8 GB Kits, Reviewed

 

[Dorlan2001]

I read your articles MasterChief, and have to admit you're right...
So I guess the only way to have a credible system stability/greater performance is by upgrading HDD's to SSD's and also upgrading the CPU or APU, right?!?

 

[MasterChief]

For "normal" activities - best bang for the buck is upgrade CPU.

For "gaming" - best bang for the buck is upgrade GPU.

SSD instead of HDD just simply accesses and writes data more quickly, so everything you do like loading a program, booting Windows, loading maps in games - all happen quicker.

That's why it's called a "system" - all components working together to create something that works. All components are important, obviously.

 

[adamf]

For "normal" activities - best bang for the buck is upgrade CPU.

Not sure about that. You only need to buy more CPU if it is already able to be provided data faster than it can process. This is rarely the case as most "normal" activities are not particularly CPU intensive. If your system is slow and not using 100% CPU then it has bottleneck in IO or memory.

 

[MasterChief]

For "normal" activities - best bang for the buck is upgrade CPU.

Not sure about that. You only need to buy more CPU if it is already able to be provided data faster than it can process. This is rarely the case as most "normal" activities are not particularly CPU intensive. If your system is slow and not using 100% CPU then it has bottleneck in IO or memory.

Splitting hairs here. I answered a question. Did you see my last two sentences in the reply or just negated them in your mind?

We already established above that memory speed itself is not often critical to overall system operational speed.

 

[Brink]

   Warning

Last warning about keeping this discussion friendly.

 

[pparks1]

I would never recommend faster ram on a system. It just amounts to nothing. Unless you are all about benchmark numbers.

 

[Dorlan2001]

For "normal" activities - best bang for the buck is upgrade CPU.

For "gaming" - best bang for the buck is upgrade GPU.

SSD instead of HDD just simply accesses and writes data more quickly, so everything you do like loading a program, booting Windows, loading maps in games - all happen quicker.

That's why it's called a "system" - all components working together to create something that works. All components are important, obviously.

Alright then, now I can fully understand the thing up!
So I think the discussion about "how RAM affects or improves speed/performance" is over, and what MasterChief said are the real ways to get faster and stable PC's... so yeah, if I have money in the near future; I will just give it a try for myself by buying a SSD for my laptop, and the next thing is upgrading my APU for gaming. Sadly the latest game my PC can handle good with both good speed and quality is 'Halo 2 for Windows Vista' and that game is from 2006 (I believe)! I wish I could play more recent games like COD or the latest NFS releases...

 

[jimbo45]

For "normal" activities - best bang for the buck is upgrade CPU.

For "gaming" - best bang for the buck is upgrade GPU.

SSD instead of HDD just simply accesses and writes data more quickly, so everything you do like loading a program, booting Windows, loading maps in games - all happen quicker.

That's why it's called a "system" - all components working together to create something that works. All components are important, obviously.

Hi there
I tend to disagree here -- if we assume that "Normal activities" are NOT things like gaming but simply Internet browsing, email, Office applications etc etc.

A lot of these are highly I/O bound so improving the CPU will make absolutely NO difference. Fitting an SSD WILL make a HUGE difference - especially on systems with lower amounts of RAM -- the Windows paging and swap files for starts will be of an order of magnitude faster than by having them on "spinners" --especially the hideous really slow ones on older machines.

I can't think of ANYBODY who has regretted fitting SSD's on any machine.

(Most users run their machines highly I/O bound -- lack of CPU power simply isn't an issue -- a simple i3 processor was more than the combined compute power of ALL participants in WW II COMBINED !!! just to give you some indication of how far computing has advanced since the end of WW II (1945).

Of course for running a huge amount of multi-tasking or compute bound applications (complex scientific calculations for example - especially Floating point calculations or intensive video editing applications) then a decent amount of processing power is required - but typically most people don't tax the processor in their computer in the slightest.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[MasterChief]

How can you possibly disagree with something that is not even defined? What if the original CPU that needs to be upgraded is something like P4 1.5 GHz, where when you load a webpage it uses 100% cpu? I made no mention and am just speaking in general...can't really see how something like that can be disagreed with.

 

[Dorlan2001]

(Most users run their machines highly I/O bound -- lack of CPU power simply isn't an issue -- a simple i3 processor was more than the combined compute power of ALL participants in WW II COMBINED !!! just to give you some indication of how far computing has advanced since the end of WW II (1945).

You don't need to go that far... a single iPhone has more computing power than the entire NASA when they put a man on the Moon on 1969! (So I think maybe I will send someone I don't like to Mars with my Laptop!)

A lot of these are highly I/O bound so improving the CPU will make absolutely NO difference. Fitting an SSD WILL make a HUGE difference - especially on systems with lower amounts of RAM

Well it does make a difference especially when you're multitasking or have several programs opened at once, that happens to me a lot when I have WMP/Zune/iTunes open playing music and at same time browsing on IE with 4 or 5 tabs opened!

 

[ainteinstein]

Just a quick reminder on SSD's a. they are expensive, about 60 cents per GB b. once the SSD gets over half full, they begin to slow down and are on par with HDD for speed and c. you can only write over them so many times before you start experiencing read/write errors.

Funny, I multitask all the time with streaming music and it is nothing for me to have 10 tabs open with no problem on a HDD.

 

[pparks1]

Just a quick reminder on SSD's a. they are expensive, about 60 cents per GB

True, they are more expensive, but they make a large improvement in performance.

b. once the SSD gets over half full, they begin to slow down and are on par with HDD for speed

My work laptop SSD is always about 85% full. It may slow down a bit, but nowhere near the speed of a regular HDD. The biggest performance benefit of an SSD is ultra low random access time. With an SSD, its like 0.01ms, which a standard mechanical hard drive its 12.0-14.0ms.

and c. you can only write over them so many times before you start experiencing read/write errors.

While true, you can only WRITE to them a limited number of times, it should be years and years and years beyond any amount of time you will want to use the drive. Normally, when the write count is exhausted you ONLY experience WRITE issues..normally you can read. Most early failures of SSD's were CONTROLLER failures...thus it was both read/write and happened far faster than it should have. It wasn't because the SSD's write cycle was fully exhausted.

Funny, I multitask all the time with streaming music and it is nothing for me to have 10 tabs open with no problem on a HDD.

HDD's don't mean the computer will perform poorly. But if you had an SSD, you would boot faster, shut down faster, launch apps faster, virus scan and malware scan MUCH, MUCH, MUCH faster, etc. These things may or may not be important to you. I run a file server at home which stores all of my data. It obviously uses standard hard drives as I need space far more than disk speed and it hardly ever is rebooted. My laptops and such all use SSD's, because I want the fastest startup and shutdown times and don't need oodles of storage as that is what I use my file server for.

 

[Tepid]

I agree with pparks

Keep in mind that the HDD/SSD for multitasking is a very small part of what get's used in the PC over all.
It is practically insignificant depending on the processes of the software running.

Multitasking relies on RAM and CPU and Bus Speeds the majority of the time.
Once things are opened, the HDD/SSD have very little to do at all with the software etc.
Unless it's something like a database, or heavily used file server (like parks stated)
There is not much that the normal consumer runs daily that needs a lot of heavy disk access.
There, over heavy use of multiple users, you want the access speed of high end drives.
SSD at this time is not the choice of course. But, HDD's and Raid setups is.
SSD as they get bigger and cheaper will replace HDD's in File Servers. Terminal Servers, Database Servers, etc.
Raid will only be used for redundant drive failures, etc. not so much for speed at that point.
Especially once VDI get's utilized more. VDI is the wave that is coming.

In a home environment though, parks is exactly right.

I know I went a little off topic, but it's relevant.

As for RAM,
Performance is what that will give you in a PC that has little RAM to begin with
Keep in mind, that a lot of people don't suffer from this any longer. It is an outdated idea now.
Anyone with a modern PC today, probably isn't running with less than 4G, generally. Not everyone, but my guess is a lot. And they should be. No modern PC bought today should run with less than 4G of RAM, imo.
So adding 2G+ isn't going to give anyone a real performance boost.
Older PC's (4+ years) with only 2G of ram, will see a performance boost by adding 2G. Not huge, but enough to notice.

In gaming PC's, where I see a lot of people make mistakes is, dropping 16G of RAM and buying a mid level GPU.
That is a waste, I will always recommend, 6G RAM total, put the rest of that money on a better GPU, that is the bang for dollar.

If you are doing Audio/Video, Virtual Machines, Programing Large Databases, etc. You want RAM, lots of it.
8G would be the minimum I would recommend on the low end and that would only be if you were going to add more sooner rather than later, 16G Recommended as the primary choice for starters. Going up from there would depend on what you were actually doing and how much.

Rendering a 60 Piece Orchestra will go a lot smoother and faster.
However, this will also depend on the software you are using, and how well it will utilize the system over all.

Virtual Machines, will suck up massive amounts RAM to run stable and allow for multiple users to access things
And again, this depends on what you are doing with it. So, 4G to 8G may suffice for the hobbyist, recommend 6G to 8G though.

In a home environment, you are probably just playing around with things,
but you will get better performance out of the 3 server and 10 clients you may want to play around with.

Keep in mind that what I stated here are all my personal opinion on general guidelines and it can change depending on what specifically each individual is going to be doing over all and how much of it. Some will be quite satisfied with less, but depending on situation, I would never recommend less. Less is not more in the tech world, that is only valid in culinary arts.

In the world of tech, very little is written in stone though.