Adding more RAM

As far as I know you would need 4 gb of RAM for the /3gb switch to take effect....??

When you are talking large assemblies how big are they? And how much RAM do you think is needed?

You can adjust the size of your side-file also if its just a matter of loading the drawings.

And take into consideration that each time you load a new assembly (if it requires ALL your memory) you should restart SW since that releases around 0,5gb RAM each time.

Comments below

So what happens if you have 2.5GB without the switch? - does it just use

2GB?

I personally don't think they're that big (not checked the stats) and I used to work on bigger assys using much worse hardware (P4-800 / 768MB RAM) using I-DEAS rather than SWX. I currently regularly exceed the amount of physical RAM, and once you get anywhere near this limit the performance dies. I think 2GB should do fine, but is there any reason ot only use 2GB if I can have 2.5GB?

I can load them, but it's murder working on them.

Yeah, but what a PITA.

Thanks for the comments, John H

The numbers don't add up when you compare memory usage as shown by the task manager and what happens when you use the 3GB switch. For quite a long time I've been running with 2.5 GB of RAM (2x1GB+1x512MB). Without the 3GB switch, I would start to have problems when the task manager showed I was using 1.3-1.6 GB. I would almost always crash before I got to 1.7 GB. With the 3GB switch, I usually don't see any problems until I get above 1.7 GB and I have survived when using more than my 2.5 GB of real memory. Your mileage may vary.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

If you really want to do some reading on the 3 Gb switch, search this newsgroup for that - it's been discussed many times. You can also go read the three original articles here.

These should answer just about all of your questions, but if not, certainly come back and ask some more.

WT

First of all make sure that whatever RAM you buy is compatible with a Dell. They are notorious for using one off components. So the 1Gb that is in there may not work at home and the 2 Gb you buy may not work if it isn't for a Dell.

As to the rest of the discussion about the 3Gb switch it does not matter how much physical ram is in your computer. I use the 3GB switch with 1Gb and it helps. You have to understand a principal of all modern computers. Ram is virtual. As far as the CPU is concerned it doesn't care where memory capacity actually resides. It can reside in RAM, hard drive(s), RAMdrive or a thumb drive. Of course physical RAM will be the fastest. Second, you have to understand that a 32bit system can normally only address 4Gb. Again it doesn't matter where it is. Windows in it's infinite wisdom decided that users should only need 2Gb for any program to run and so reserved 2Gb for the OS. This is taken up by paging tables, cache and a host of other uses. But the OS really doesn't need all that so the 3Gb switch allows more Ram to be used by programs. Again it doesn't matter whether it is physical ram or hard drive. The memory manager plays games with memory by trying to keep in physical Ram the data that is being accessed most frequently and stores the rest on the hard drive page file system. So unless your application really uses more physical ram than is installed you will not notice much difference.

I wrote a benchmark called PatBench that on many releases of SW will exhaust all the memory in a computer, even on a 64 bit machine. If you run this you can watch memory being used up in Task Manager until about 1.6Gb without the 3Gb switch or 2.6Gb with it. Then the machine will lock up. Windows doesn't gracefully exit an absolute lack of memory.

You can also gain memory by shutting down uneeded programs and services.

And a final note, not all applications will make use of the 3Gb switch. SW will.

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