PC upgrade question RAM

Hey guys I have a number of PCs at work that are coming to their end of life but the department can't afford to replace them all so as a compromise for some I was just going to upgrade the memory to either 1GB or 2GB from 512, the PCs are single processor P4 with sata disks.

The 2GB sticks are only £7/$11 (don't quote me on that conversion) more than the 1GB but am I going to see the difference or should I save my £7.

The PC's are used for basic apps such as word and they should hopfully need to last another 18 months 2 years MAX

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Comments

blargoe

Dude. You have to give us more information than that to get any kind of educated guess.

What OS are they running?
What are they doing with the computers?
What apps are running in the background?
Etc.

Short uneducated answer: Typical XP user doing nothing fancy, 2GB is probably a waste.

aueddonline

blargoe wrote:

Dude. You have to give us more information than that to get any kind of educated guess.

What OS are they running?
What are they doing with the computers?
What apps are running in the background?
Etc.

Short uneducated answer: Typical XP user doing nothing fancy, 2GB is probably a waste.

The machines are running XP pro and the only app used is office 2003

vCole

At my old work, we upgraded the same type of machines to 1GB and the users used XP & mainly office 2003.

I think you'll be good upgrading to 1gb, 2 maybe a waste.

aueddonline

yeah 1 GB sounds like the magic number, i guess that's still twice as much as they have already

cheers dudes

skrpune

what else is running in the background?? Antivirus or any other sort of resident protection? If these computers are truly not running anything else other than Office then there's no need for an upgrade. (But if they're running Norton or other resource-hoggy AV programs, they might need some more RAM to get them moving.) They probably could use a clean up & tune up though, and I bet that would increase performance without any hardware expenditure.

Just take a quick look at the resource/RAM usage of each machine & if RAM and CPU usage are high consistently after a cleanup, then you might want to try upping the RAM. I'm all for upgrading & making machines faster, but at some point it doesn't make sense and sometimes throwing money at something will only result in you having less money in your pocket rather than having a better result...

RussS

Heck, XP with Office 2003 should run well enough with 512MB. When was the last time these machines had a tidy-up?