Internal Memory

[curmudgeon]

My Christmas present to myself was a new scanner, so that I can finally scan all my old slides and negatives. On using it, it seemed a bit slow so I resolved to upgrade the internal memory from 512Mb to 1Gb.

I knew that I needed a stick of 184 pin DIMM, PC2700. On lurking one evening in PC World (I know, I know) I saw they had a a sale on for memory, with a good price for what I needed but PC3200. The salesman said that the faster speed of this stick on sale wouldn't have any adverse effect on my system. So far I've installed it, resized the virtual memory, ( http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?t=205286 ), thanks guys, but there doesn't seem to be much difference.

The processor is Athlon 2800+, and I'm running XP SP2.

Should I take the PC3200 back and get a stick of PC 2700?

[marlowe]

www.crucial.com really good place to buy memory as they scan your computer and tell you exactly what you need for your system

[frostbite]

If you got a 1gb stick and replaced your existing memory then that should be fine.

If you are mixing memory speeds, that should also run (at the lower speed) but can cause problems on some systems. From what you say, it doesn't appear to have been a problem.

[Conan the Librarian]

Hang on a minute... It might well be that the benefits are to be realised if you are doing other things on the PC at the same time. With 1GB it might feel a bit smoother, but if you load up 5 other programs, you will find that the old scanner hasn't slowed down one bit.

It might be an idea, if you feel tht scanning is slow - to review the scan settings. Mind you, I firmly believe that if you are going to scan anything, it may as well be at the highest settings that you can. Me? Athlon 2800+Barton plus 1GB dual channel RAM. Nope - at high settings, the scanner isn't that fast, but do have a looksie at how much memory it actually takes to do the job and you might be surprised.

Conan

[curmudgeon]

Many thanks, guys, for your reassuring and informative replies!

Cur