A Question for the Computer Pros

[rajee]

I would like to be able to
surf the web with firefox, which takes up 89,540 kb of memory, run a video editing program that takes up approximately 180,000 kilobytes, an image creating/animating program that takes up 72,000 kilobytes, Bitcomet bittorrent program which takes 40,000+ kilobytes and Emule peer to peer program which takes up 21,500 kilobytes of memory at the same time.

I have 1 GB of ram, a 2.01 ghz AMD Athlon 3200 64 bit Processor with plenty of hard drive space.

Do I need more ram, or a duo/dual-core processor or both?

 

[Icycle]

I will assume by your question that you are unhappy with the current performance of your machine under the described working set.

If you have to choose only one, I would suggest getting more RAM. That is the cheapest and easiest upgrade, and it will generally help peformance across all your applications. Some of the applications you list below, such as Firefox, the video editing program, and the image editing/animation program will probably grow to take up quite a bit more memory than is listed below as you open more browser windows, open new video clips, etc. Also, the operating system itself occupies a considerable amount of memory. When the amount of memory runs low, performance will suffer, because the computer will start to use the hard disk as virtual memory, which makes your memory effectively as large as needed, but at a cost in speed.

You will probably see some performance increase from a dual proc or dual core machine, but not as much as with more memory, because it won't necessary help all applications. Applications that are specifically written to take advantage of multiple processors, such as high-end multimedia applications could almost double in speed. Processor intensive applications that weren't necessarily written for mutli-proc will still see some performance inhancement, because they can run on one CPU/core while a different application runs at the same time on the other CPU/core. So adding an additional processor will help things like rendering webpages, rendering 3D scenes, running Photoshop filters, and encoding and decoding audio and video, but it won't help much for network or disk intensive activities.

 

[rajee]

Thanks Icycle. 🙂

 

[Ronley]

Assuming half a GB for system and any other background programs, that still comes up to about .9 GB, or 100 MB short of your maximum.

If your unhappy with your comps performance, you can pull up task manager and check that. If you have a program like SETI that runs in the background and uses up extra CPU power, it will always show 100% utilization. Otherwise, under the performance tab, it will show you how much CPU all your currently open programs are using. If it's close to or at 100%, it means something is using up most of computer power, you can get a detail list under the processes tab as to what it is.

It's also worth noting that the amount of memory used by your video and image editing programs will most likely vary depending on file size, and both tend to have large files. I've only had to deal with raw audio, that was huge, and raw video is worse. If you have poor performance, my bet would be that more RAM would help, but a quick check in task manager might tell you if the processor is overloaded too.

It is worth noting some programs (especially OpenGL apparently) will use 100% of CPU, but not impede other programs. I haven't figured that one out yet.

 

[rajee]

Thanks Ronley.

 

[nowayjose]

RAM+CPU should be more than sufficient for the things you described.

If you're running Windows, maybe run some anti-virus/anti-spyware tool(s) to check nothing unwanted is hogging your machine. Deinstalling unused software packages and defragmenting your hard disk after that might also have some (small) effect.

 

[rajee]

Thanks No way Jose.

 

[toneus79]

ALT + CTRL + DELETE

But you must do them all at the same time.

 

[rajee]

Thanks Toneus.