Originally posted by ParticleMan
256mb of ram for any version of Windows XP should be considered a minimum. 512mb I recommend personally if you play games. Any kind of flight sim or FPS will run better with more ram. When I run Battlefield or a Flight Sim they can and will use upwards of 300 to 400mb of free memory. Imagine if you didn't have that free memory? It's written to the disk, which is SLOW.
I too play Battlefield, UT2003 etc. and I find that with 256mb and a fully tweaked XP system that its no slower than my mates similar spec machine. We get almost identical benchmark scores and load times, despite his machine having 512mb.
I found that looking at memory usage in games with 256 & 512mb that XP would use as much memory as is available.
But if it was quicker with 512mb I couldn't tell the difference, again this could be due to my ram's bandwidth being 3gb/s by being overclocked to 200mhz.
I run FMS as I too am a cheapskate, and would prefer to invest more money in my planes than a sim. FMS while somewhat unrealistic helps immensely with orientation and co-ordination.
Can't argue with Free either. Hopefully it will get better the more its worked on.
With FMS and my GF4 Ti4400 I can run at 1600x1200x32bit with 4x Antialiasing and average around 55fps. Not too bad.
Papa-NeGeorgeo, the ram thing..... its probably best to phone up Dell when you want to upgrade. They will send you a matching stick, as its usually best to match ram by brand. They may put you in contact with a tech who will install it for you.
The biggest increase I saw when upgrading ram was going from 64mb to 128mb on an old Windows 98 machine. Since then I haven't noticed a difference, except on our work server going from 512mb to 2gb....definately sped things up.
SimJen