Optimal amount of RAM

[Tricky_Dicky]

I've got about 20 older machines which I'm hoping to put back in to service.

 

They are 3Ghz Pentium 4's and currently have 512Mb of RAM. How much do you think I should put in? Another 512 stick is about £18, a gig stick is £33 (prices from scan ex VAT).

 

We are currently running XP but hoping to upgrade to Windows 7 in the foreseeable future.

Rich

[timbo343]

Bloody hell, thats expensive... What DDR are they?? I bought some PC2-5300 1Gb for just over £11 each, mind you i did buy 176 sticks to do what you are doing.

[Tricky_Dicky]

Bloody hell, thats expensive... What DDR are they?? I bought some PC2-5300 1Gb for just over £11 each, mind you i did buy 176 sticks to do what you are doing.

 

Just standard DDR-400 PC-3200. They are pretty old machines.

When did you buy that as the price of memory seems to be going through the roof at the moment?

[timbo343]

oh, that is the right price then. The old stuff is getting more expensive...

 

We bought ours during the summer break, the summer just gone. I basically went out to as many suppliers as possible and wasn't bothered about the make. We ended up getting transend memory.

[alextreadwell]

I would try 7 on them first I installed 7 on a dell gx270 2.8GHz with only 512mb in and it flies windows 7 on, it seems to cut back on graphics performance when you have less ram and they run great much better than XP SP3 with a gig in, if you can get the ram go for the most you can get.

[3s-gtech]

We have similar machines as teacher PCs around the school, running very well with 1GB in now. 2GB would be great, but no point if the apps you run won't use it. 512MB isn't much good now though - Windows XP+AV alone uses all but about 110MB of it. Load up a web browser and it'll crawl

[timbo343]

Last year we were running 512mb in teacher machines but last year we decided to stick a gig stick in the machines. They ran better as this meant there was 1.25Gb in the machines. Now, this year we have upt'd it to 2Gb installed and SIMS is not working like a dream.

[timzim]

SIMS is not working like a dream.

 

Was that a typo?

[Tricky_Dicky]

Was that a typo?

I was just wondering that

[Tricky_Dicky]

Thanks for all the replies.

 

I'm going to put an extra Gb in to them all and I think that will be a happy medium between price and performance.

[timbo343]

Ahh, yeah, sorry, It was meant to say, SIMS working like a dream...

[AyatollahPies]

Ahh, yeah, sorry, It was meant to say, SIMS working like a dream...

 

I'd have thought that was more of a Typo to be honest.

[teejay]

Test the machines with Windows 7 before you buy anything for them, you may have compatibility problems with graphics/sound drivers which we found on our older machines.

[Tricky_Dicky]

Test the machines with Windows 7 before you buy anything for them, you may have compatibility problems with graphics/sound drivers which we found on our older machines.

 

Will do, thanks for the warning.

[bossman]

@Tricky_Dicky:

 

Have just ordered 60 1Gb strips of corsair memory for £1034 each stick costing approx £17 and will release another 2 years life from these machines due to run windows 7 (tested and works fine with 512Mb) so for me it is a good investment as I will recycle them to thin clients in another 2 years time.

[CyberNerd]

Ahh, yeah, sorry, It was meant to say, SIMS working like a dream...

 

you mean you were dreaming that SIMS was working...

[Tricky_Dicky]

@Tricky_Dicky:

 

Have just ordered 60 1Gb strips of corsair memory for £1034 each stick costing approx £17 and will release another 2 years life from these machines due to run windows 7 (tested and works fine with 512Mb) so for me it is a good investment as I will recycle them to thin clients in another 2 years time.

 

Do you mind telling me where you got that from? I've just been quoted £30.80 per stick for 20 sticks.

[elsiegee40]

I've been sticking 1Gb in my old machines with 512MB RAM as basic; costings at about £20 per PC even at our small volumes.

[morganw]

Depending on the applications you use would it be worth considering using the money for a terminal server + licenses rather than increasing the memory? If you use them as RDP terminals with something like thinstation you'll get better performance and have increased scope for good remote access as part of the deal. It would save on Windows 7 licensing as well if you aren't on an MS schools agreement.

[jsnetman]

My thougts are and MS recommend 2gig of RAM for win 7, 1 or gig will get them going but start running anything intensive on them and they will run slow. You might get way with 1.5 but I would test them in a classroom situation first, logon as a standard user and run a couple of heavy apps. You should have no problem with drivers, I'm installing 7 on 4 year old laptops and never had a major driver issue.

[Butuz]

DDR2 400 is hideously expensive - it's always the same with older ram becoming more and more expensive as the factories produce less and less of it. Try buying some PC100 ram now!!!

 

I considered the exact same plan hoping to upgrade some 100 PC's - unfortunately I wouldn’t want to go from 512 to 2gb if I was going to go to the hassle of ripping the tops off them and that would work out at about £60-70 per PC. It's simply not worth spending that much on 6 year old PC's so I'll be putting the £6000 - £7000 towards new PC's.

 

Butuz