Is 4GB of RAM tooooo much?

My new puter system under Vista runs nice and cool.... but some games freeze up, forcing a painful power-off shutdown before I can continue using the machine.

(Vista 32-bit... ASUS P5N32-E SLI 680i mobo with dual 8600 GTS cards... Intel Core2 Duo E6850... 2GB RAM)

Would doubling my RAM help avoid game freezes?

I installed the new NVIDIA GeForce 8 driver released this week as well...

My new puter system under Vista runs nice and cool.... but some games freeze up, forcing a painful power-off shutdown before I can continue using the machine.

(Vista 32-bit... ASUS P5N32-E SLI 680i mobo with dual 8600 GTS cards... Intel Core2 Duo E6850... 2MB RAM)

Would doubling my RAM help avoid game freezes?

I installed the new NVIDIA GeForce 8 driver released this week as well...

RockySquirrel

LOL 2MB RAM is toooooooooooooooooooooo small.

Anyway I guess you meant 2GB RAM. 2GB RAM is enough for Vista, when you are idle Vista will use nearly 800MB & wehn you start a game Vista will release nearly 500MB of RAM from 800MB. I think your computer is overheating.

well vista will take up 1gb idol... thern everything else you got running in background... and games lik crysis is about 2gbs so rly 3gbs is rly all you need, unless youll have liek crysis... like windows media player... and liek 3 sites giongsimpsons1fan

LOL, When you start a game Vista will release Extra RAM you've used (Vista's minimum required RAM is 512MB) If you using 1GB Vista will use nearly 700MB & when you start a game Vista will release nearly 400MB

Programs and games need too much memory overall. 2GB seems like it should be more than enough, but apearantly it's not. Well... supposedly.

I doubt there is a such thing as TOO MUCH memory. And even therewas therewould bea failsafe. Meaning the system would use all of it. The disk operator would limit the amout of memory that is uses.

The problem is somewhere else. The easiest way to find out would be to take out some memory boards then turn the thing back on and see what it does. If it does the same thing it's the memory which I doubt it is. Operating systems and software have limiters, they only use what they can and disable the rest.

If you're using a 32bit OS like most of us then it won't address the full 4GB of RAM anyway so some will go to waste, you certainly don't want more than that unless you are running 64bit. danny_stapleton

You can try turning on PAE (Physical Address Extension). Turning that on should allow you to see your entire 4gb of ram in a 32bit operating system:

Open up a command prompt (press the Windows button type "cmd" and then press the Enter key), type "bcedit /set pae forceenable" and press the enter key. Done.

2 gb ram is enough for now i think, 4 gb is just waste of money. you can check your power supply. i think you have some problem in power supply. fahad2mail

He's right, I've run Crysis on very high, gears of war, cod4, its really unnecessary at the moment.

Unless you got the upgrade from 2GB to 4B for like $100 it's not worth it. You won't get any use out of it. The memory dumps in current programs aren't large enough. Current programs kick out more data than they put in, so the system will never need to have more than 2GB of information on standby at any point while the program is running. The program doesn't need anymore than propably a Gig a or less than a gigat any moment.

Now if you want to run a dozen high resource applictation in the backround while the game runs you will need more memory. You can simply avoid that by shutting all of those applications down.

SO yeah, if all of your memory is being used up by other programs the game will need more memory simply because it has no where to store critical data for random access. It will keep fighting with the other progams over memory storage.

I hve this to ask. I have a Acer AMD Athlon 3800+ with 2 gigs of ram but am only able to use 1.5 gigs of it for like games or what ever. I don't know what all is going on in the background but there is a whole bunch of stuff but I'm not sure what all it does and I'm afraid of just shutting down anything in there cause I did it once before and it had to be rebooted and so the stuff that I did remove was back again and so I gave up on that.

At any rate I was thinking of going up to 1 more gig to make it 3 so I would technacaly have 3 but only able to use 2 of it. Well that is the idea at least caus SC and the forged alliance requierment says 1 gig of ram at least but that is the max not the min. Anyways I know I'm talking about SC here at it is rough on any machine but I would like to have it run smooth with out in going into a slow motion deal even at the lowest settings it still does this and I have a Nvidia 8600 gt XXx edition 256mb

It depends what you are running. 4gb is not possible with 32bit windows. You would have to move to 64bit vista to utilize your 4gb.

Try installing the latest drivers and close unnecessary applications running in the back ground to see if that helps

You know, it's a GOOD thing that Vista uses so much ram when you're idle. It means it works faster - it keeps programs you commonly use cached and other nice things. This being since RAM is massively faster than your hard drive.

If you alt+f4 out of a computer game, you'll see for a split second that instead of using 35-60% of your ram it'll say 20-25% in the little sidebar thingy.

I don't get why people say 4GB is too much, sure it may not be fully utilized......yet. I spent the extra $100 for 4GB on my new rig because I know it will be used in the future(no denying this). Plus I can easily upgrade to 8GB as well.bobaban

Because "in the future" when that 4gbs is actually needed you will likely not still be using the same ram you just spent $100 on.