How to Determine If You Need More RAM in Your Computer

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By desolator144
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I’m a computer repairer and the most common problem I see other than viruses are people without enough ram/memory in their computers. Since it’s so simple to install new memory, adding more is something anyone can do. Plus it’s extremely cheap and will speed up your computer more than any other upgrade. But first you need to determine if you need more ram in the first place.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Step 1

Start by right clicking on My Computer on your desktop or start menu then click properties.
Step 2

system properties

This will bring up the system properties. On the General tab, which should open first by default, you’ll see near the bottom right the amount of ram you have installed. On a few computers this may not be listed there. See the attached image for an example of my computer’s system properties with 2.00 GB of ram.
Step 3

Now that you know how much ram you have, restart your computer and login. Don’t open any programs, just let the computer boot completely and run whatever programs it auto-runs at startup.
Step 4

Now press control-alt-delete to bring up the task manager and click on the Performance tab. Near the bottom you should see a display like the one attached to this step. Focus on the Total and Available amounts of Physical Memory.
Step 5

The amounts are in Kilobytes so ignore the last 3 digits. The next 3 digits after that are the amounts of Megabytes you have total and available. If it goes up to 7 digits then lucky you, you have at least 1 gigabyte.
Step 6

Now you need to do some math. Write down what the total amount is and the available amount and strip off the last 3 digits so they’re both in megabytes. So if the value is 129427 available, write down 129 MB available.
Step 7

Now divide the available amount by the total amount and multiply by 100 and you’ll get the percent of free memory. If you have 129 available out of 256 MB total, that would be 50.39% free
Step 8

If your percentage is lower than 50%, that means it’s taking over half the ram just to boot into Windows. XP SP3 and the usual startup programs typically take over 300 MB just to start up so if you have 256MB, you’ve hit a major slowdown from basically just turning the computer on! If you’re over 50% empty ram, you’re still not off the hook yet though. Continue to step 9.
Step 9

Now open all the programs that you typically have open at once when you’re pretty busy. So probably open your e-mail program, a few web pages, and whatever other software you use often. Now re-check the available ram compared to the total ram and see how empty it is. If it’s under 25% empty now, you’ll probably want to consider getting more ram. If it’s 15%, your situation is pretty critical and you absolutely need more ram! You may also want to consider opening the most memory intensive programs you use like a video or photo editor and see what the ram is at then. If that causes the memory to be mostly full, you’d still benefit from installing more but it’s a bit more optional since more may not be needed to run lesser program like an internet browser and your e-mail.

Comments

jeni10 said

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on 10/5/2009 Great article on how to determine if you need more RAM in your computer. I'm definitely checking mine. Thanks for sharing your expertise. 5* and I recommend.