It's Bliss

I finally got my replacement stick of RAM today, and my PC is at last up to full strength.  Ever since I diagnosed it and got it to limp along with half the memory, I’ve been troubled by its speed.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have it back, even crippled.  But still, it had been bottlenecking at the memory, and it’s very, very nice to have it back.  Having a nice quad-core processor and one of the best video cards on the market doesn’t help when the low memory slows everything to a crawl.

I've been loving it tonight.  I haven't even played too many games, just a little Call of Duty (I'm considering getting CoD 4 relatively soon, and by that I mean in 3-6 months, if not longer).  No, the best part is the vastly-improved response time.  Programs open and close right away, I can switch windows quickly, and all my little system tray programs don't slow me down a bit.  It's bliss.

I’m now considering a third stick of memory.  Vista 32-bit allows up to 4GB of memory address space, but some of that space is taken with things like PCI add-in cards and video memory.  Because of that, my maximum amount of RAM is actually quite a bit less than 4GB.  But my best guess is that it’ll be somewhere between 2.5 and 3 GB, so it might be worth it to get a third stick of RAM and use as much as I can out of it.

I fervently hope that driver and compatibility issues are worked out in Vista 64-bit by the time I need to upgrade because I need more RAM.  I also hope there’s a relatively easy way to upgrade without losing a ton of data and having to spend a week doing it.  I love working on computers, but something like that really ought to be streamlined at this point.