Upgrading to 16gb's of ram

I just bought 16gb's of ram and I was wondering can I just put my ram in since I have windows 7 64bit.

 

Yeah in 4-5 years 16gb of ram will be next to nothing, keep this in mind.

-adrianc

 

I'd like 16GB RAM. (^_^);

I'd use it with Linux, install a server in the basement dedicated to running virtual machine instances, and reduce all desktops all around the house to basic Internet terminals.

EDIT: And yes, Windows 64-bit should be able to use the memory. You could use a PAE kernel and make use of extra RAM that way on a 32-bit OS, but as far as I know Microsoft doesn't allow this because they want to charge you for the upgrade. For Linux, you have the choice of moving to a 64-bit version, or running a 32-bit PAE kernal.

 

I'd love to have 16gb of ram, this laptop has 4gb and my desktop 6gb but honestly I've run into the problem of wanting to run applications that run best under XP 32-bit. No point in more than 4gb there at all.

With 16gb I'd probably run a page file inside of a ram drive. Easily partition off 8gb without the OS ever hiccuping and as a bonus every time you turn your machine off the page file gets wiped.

Personally though I'd go with Assembler's idea and get a 128gb SSD for the OS, 2TB harddrive for storage and 8gb of ram for every day use. I'd just make sure to buy a single 8gb stick as to make sure the other slots are free for other 8gb sticks as they become dirt cheap in the near future.

 

i just bought 16gb ram seeing as ram is so inexpensive nowadays, i got 8gb for the price i payed for a 4gb modal back in January, ssd for just os is worth every penny aswell its what im running right now, yeah all u need to use the ram is to have a 64bit os

 

Thank you guys. Yeah my uncle has a sad its awesome.

 

Just make sure you have 64bit and enough ram slots.

 

Damn kids these days. When I was your age 1gb of DDR1 was $110!

And we thought that was CHEAP!

 

i remember when i payed £80 for 2gb stick of ddr2 and that was cheap....

 

I have 16GB and am still using WinXP 32bit xD
Haven't decided yet if I will use the 12,5GB ram that are inaccessable to WinXP for a hdd cache or a ramdrive.

 

Bah kids I remember when 32K of RAM would have set you back over $100...

 

Virtual memory/swap files are badddddd; even if SSD are (relatively) fast, they're expensive and there's still a lot of protocol and file system overhead. Unfortunately Windows isn't very good at trading off so it's inefficient no matter what. RAM really helps more now than ever because of all the freaking memory leaks in dependencies like Flash, Java, .NET, browser JS implementations. I have to agree though that 16GB is excessive. I manage to do a lot of CAD with 2GB (upgraded from 1). 4GB seems about standard (already inflated), so if you want to prepare for the next 5 years, 8GB should be the sweet spot. Buying RAM before you need it is a waste of money since it won't be put to use, will never be cheaper now than in the future, and it does consume more power to keep it refreshed. Someone could probably power their netbook on the power drawn by 8GB of unused RAM.

 

WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE A 10MB HD COSTS £3K


(I Kid, I kid,)

 

Unless you're 45 I'd hope you're kidding.

Though I do have a 100mb hdd here somewhere...

 

my dad was telling me when he started working with computers that a 32k memory Chip was worth about £500 and his first project was corruption correction on a 16k memory XD

 

DDR3 = 6400MB/s (slowest speed, goes upto much more)

SSD = Lots less.

Also, Windows 7 will cache files from your HDD to ram, so its much faster loading apps as they are already in ram to start with.


However, SSD's are awesome in their own right. Once you go SSD, you wont go back.

 

You all kinda missed something here, nobody asked if his motherboard can actually handle 16gb of RAM. I mean it's perhaps not entirely likely nowadays that it would be unable to but some motherboards are capped at a maximum, the one in my sister's PC is capped at 8GB for instance and my friend's laptop was capped at 4GB before he took it back and demanded a refund because the know-nothing salesman told him it was "fully upgradeable to 8gb"

 

16GB on a server for VMs? If you compile linux properly and set everything up efficiently you wouldn't even need 8GB of RAM. I've got a dell poweredge 2950 with 8GB of RAM and was able to (with vmware ESM) run a server 03 32bit, server 03 64 bit and a few linux (arch and gentoo) VMs with no noticable lag on the web server.