how do you know if you need more ram?

It seems thats there is a lot of confusion out there, about RAM and how it affects the speed of your PC.

If a computer starts feeling slow, there could be many reasons for it.

Suprisingly, many people don’t know how to check and see if RAM is the cause of the slowdown.

Others believe that the more RAM you add to a computer, the faster it will go. This is not so… if your PC normally uses, say, 600Mb RAM while you use it, then increasing RAM from 1000Mb to 2000Mb will have no effect on the speed.

In order to let anyone know if their computer needs more RAM, Computer Aid now has a new freeware utility called Hym. You can download HYM from here

Just download it to someplace like your desktop, run it, and you will get a “yes / no / maybe” answer to the question of “do you need more RAM?“.

If you run a wide variety of programs, then you can minimize HYM to the task tray, and keep an eye on your RAM usage as you work/play.

Comments

how do you know if you need more ram? — 11 Comments

Reel Advice on 26 August, 2009 at 11:38 pm said:

what about the ever reliable Task Manager? It shows how much RAM you are eating up right?
Computer Help on 26 August, 2009 at 11:44 pm said:

Hi Reel Advice,

Yep, task manager works well.

But most average people have no idea what all the numbers mean.

Actually… most average people have no idea that task manager even exists, nor how to start it.

Hym takes the guesswork out of task manager… you run it, and if it tells you you need more RAM, then you KNOW you can speed up your PC by adding more RAM.
Steve on 27 August, 2009 at 12:41 am said:

Good work, writing a program!
Between my research and EC, I keep a LOT of Chrome tabs open, and a text editor, and usually a video running in the corner from Youtube or off my media drive.
So the upshot is, I hear the crunching of the paging file a lot and would experience some speed increase with more than 3GB RAM.
On the other hand, I would eat up any amount of RAM until something else was the limiting factor and upgrading is not that important.
I grew up in the late 80’s with limited access to an Amiga, then my dad got a Commodore 64 for us to play with, then an actual iMac! We had 56K internet until 2002, long after everyone I knew upgraded.
This story is all to say that expectations color your judgement of performance and I think my computer is giddily blinding fast just because it loads videos in real time and can switch between programs in about a second. It will not be upgraded soon, if ever.
Computer Help on 27 August, 2009 at 1:01 am said:

Hi Steve.

Yep, the Amiga was cool… way ahead of its time.

If you already have 3Gb RAM, then the only way to increase it is to go 64-bit (eg Vista 64). I discuss Vista 64 at: http://www.computer-aid.com.au/blog/2009/04/15/vista-64-ram-usage/
Shinade aka Jackie on 28 August, 2009 at 6:30 am said:

I would like to ask you a question about how you actually speed up your PC. I was just at a site that said to go to Run and type gsedit/mic and then it listed steps to go from there to help you gain more speed.

I don;t actually know how to explain what i am talking about. But, I do know there is some way you can go in and create more space and speed up your run time.

I am on WindowsXP and when I typed that in I got an error message saying the path and file could not be located.

I hope you can understand what I trying to lern how to do by recognizing….gsedit/mic.

If you do, I would love to know how to do it. I know my SIL was always doing something he called racing his speed up??? I have no clue about any of this technical stuff.

But, I do know that I should be running faste than I am. I hope you can answer this question for me.

I will be back by tomorrow and see if I made any sense at all to you with this question.

Thanks bunches in advance!
- Computer Help on 28 August, 2009 at 10:59 am said:
  
  Hi Shinade,
  
  The are 2 general categories to speeding up your computer.
  
  1) The easy, but expensive way is to just add faster hardware (faster CPU, video card, RAM, etc)
  
  2) The more complicated, yet cheaper way is to tune your Windows and to use more “efficient” software.
  
  What you are saying doesn’t make much sense, but you really need to know (and understand) what you are doing, in order to do windows tuning.
  
  Of course, once you have tuned Windows, you just cannot make it go any faster without adding more hardware anyway.
andy on 31 August, 2009 at 5:04 pm said:

I think when the computer become slower than before, noise from the harddisk become more unacceptable, that’s the right time andihawe
Shinade aka Jackie on 31 August, 2009 at 5:16 pm said:

Thanks for the answer. I was afraid really to try the other advice and now I am glad that Windows didn’t allow it.

I did go in and clean out some programs that I rarely use, cleaned up my desktop, defragged and now I am running much better.

But, then I went over my fair usage time on both satellites and havn’t been able to get back here.

So I am here now and thank you for answering my question!!
Hasannudin on 24 September, 2009 at 12:20 pm said:

I just used 512MB RAM in my computer and I felt its quite fast, but I wanna add more become 1GB so my speed become faster. I always check my memory usage in task manager. I plan to dowload your program too. good job
rimar on 16 June, 2010 at 6:31 am said:

says its a virus when i downloaded it.. avg btw
Computer Help on 21 June, 2010 at 7:25 pm said:

Hi Rimar,

Some Anti Virus (eg AVG) will just blindly flag any software written using AutoIT, as a virus.

The problem is with some lazy antivirus companies, not with HYM and any Computer Aid software.

You can safely ignore the AVG warning, and run HYM.exe without any problems to your system.

Regards,
Luigi