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TabletPCBuzz.com - Increase RAM to 1 GB
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What would I notice if I were to increase the RAM of my M1400 from 528K to 1 GB? I use the M1400 for writing with MS Word 2003. I use NaturallySpeaking V8 voice recognition software along with the pen. I also use the M1400 for access to the Web. No games or CAD.
USA
342 Posts My Tablet PCs: Motion M1400,
Motion M1300,
Fuji LTP600,
Fuji 1200 (wooo!)
Posted - Feb 04 2005 : 09:11:58 AM
I think you would notice less disk activity. On the tablets at work with 1GB, dragon and outlook open, they sit at about 400-450 MB free. Well worth it in my opinion. Less disk access, better battery life, quicker system response.
I recently did such an upgrade. The biggest improvements were in running really _huge_ programs (Dragon may qualify) and in heavy multitasking (I tend to have one or two dozen IE windows, Outlook, OneNote, Acrobat Reader, Visual Studio, and a bunch of other stuff open simultaneously). Other areas didn't show much improvement, as they really weren't hitting the disk much anyway (and, except for the case of badly written programs like Acrobat Reader, they weren't particularly slow in the first place). One noteable area where performance worsened was hibernate/wakeup and suspend/resume. This is not surprising since there's so much more memory to push around.
I recently did such an upgrade. The biggest improvements were in running really _huge_ programs (Dragon may qualify) and in heavy multitasking (I tend to have one or two dozen IE windows, Outlook, OneNote, Acrobat Reader, Visual Studio, and a bunch of other stuff open simultaneously)
As far as IE is concerned, you might want to have a look at Maxthon (was: myIE2) or Firefox - both apps use less memory even with that many tabs open than IE uses,
and you might want to try to use Acrobat Speedup if you arent using it yet ( http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index.php )
this is slightly off topic but I thought I'd contribute this advice anyway :)
Actually, I'm kind of skeptical that these "tabbed browser" programs save any significant amount of memory. If you go through and sum up all the memory usage for one or two dozen IE windows, it's really not that bad at all. And, depending on what numbers you look at, the total may be deceptive. Many of the common elements are in fact shared between the separate IE processes (using "copy on write" memory, technically speaking). Windows manages memory in incredibly wierd and subtle ways, and the "usage" numbers it spits back practically require a master's degree to decipher.
(As an example, open a new IE window. For me, it registers as using about 18MB ram, according to Task Manager. Now, minimize it. Suddenly it's using only 1.5MB! Next, restore it and open a few webpages. It immediately jumps up to about 5MB and steadily climbs from there but never reaches the original value. Finally, minimize it again, and it's back to 1.5MB. You're watching the perplexing beast known as "working-set trimming" or "second-chance paging".)
I never really had any trouble with tons of IE windows even with 512MB RAM. What caused the most trouble in conjunction with IE were PDFs and the resources gobbled up by Acrobat Reader.
Running a consolidated browser also costs you one valuable feature: fault isolation. If the Acrobat Reader plugin crashes, or another extension brings down IE, or even if there's an internal fault, I only lose one or two windows. If you run everything in the same process, and something goes wrong, you lose everything.
I haven't tried ARSU. I looked at it once, but it seemed like it just was supposed to improve startup time, not improve the performance of AR once it's running. The latter is really the problem for me, since I always have at least one PDF already open anyway. Does it help with that at all? The temporary hangs, the sluggishness on page-down, the stupidly long delays with more than five or six PDFs open in IE, etc?
Increase RAM to 1 GB 
Posted - Feb 04 2005 : 08:26:58 AM
