[ale] Upgrading RAM?

David Tomaschik ozone at webgroup.org
Tue Jul 17 13:42:52 EDT 2007


Slightly OT, but I'm trying to decide if it's worth it to upgrade the 
RAM in my desktop.  The machine is a 2.8GHz P4 (HT) and currently has 
1GB of PC3200.  It has 750GB of disk, and a fairly normal report from 
'free' looks something like:

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1011        920         90          0         71        339
-/+ buffers/cache:        509        501
Swap:         2008        455       1552


 From newegg, 2x512 would run me about $55, 2x1GB for about $105.  I 
realize there's a lot of RAM sitting in buffers and cache, but it also 
seems to throw a lot out to swap.  I mainly use the machine for 
development, web browsing, email (Thunderbird probably uses 1/3 of my 
system memory at any given time), and for remote file access (via SSH). 
Is it worth upgrading?

David



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