Is it advisable to max out the ram capacity on your computer? Like if your comp has a maximum 8GB of ram capacity, should you place 8GB of ram inside or wait till your system slows down? What happens to the excess ram when you dont use it? For example, you bought a new laptop with 2 GB advertised and you only use 1GB, what happens to the other half? Is it advisable to add more or just wait till it nears the 2GB limit?
if you can afford to, yes. (although going above 8GB is probably excessive unless you use ram heavy applications.) Nothing happens to the excess ram, it just sits there unused until its needed. (Note that 32bit windows cannot support more than 4GB, so if you have more than 4GB the rest will never be used and cannot be used. 64bit windows does not have this limitation). However there are exceptions. For example, if your board maxes at 12GB, and uses dual channel ram, then it is inadvisable to go above 8GB because you would lose the benefit of dual channel. (so the ram would run at half speed). If your board supports 24GB of ram or more, then maxing it out is probably spending money unnecessarily. Windows will always swap to hard disk no matter how much physical ram you have available, because the memory management is badly designed. Linux, in contrast, will not use swap until all the physical ram is exhausted.
4GB including video ram. for various reasons it usually shows up as 3.5GB. This only applies to windows, 32bit linux supports PAE which allows addressing of more than 4GB of ram. Only windows 2003 enterprise supports this feature, even though every processor since the pentium pro has supported it.
You don't know that. I've seen a significant improvement in performance when the amount of ram has been increased. the general rule is more is better to a point, said point being 4GB-8GB
I hope you don't mind me interrupting, but usually when ram is used it typically calls for more space when data is stored.
