Ram ? For Pc Users.

what operating system
what type processor multi cor vs single core
what type ram is your board capable of single, dual or quad channel ram etc

for instance if your running vista additional ram is almost a must

otherwise with xp no
with xp the real difference will occur if you utilize dual channel mode vs single channel mode


2nd of all on vista it has that ready boost plug in a thumb drive and it will page with it instead of the heard drive and that solid state chip will be alot faster then it would be off a hard drive unless your running raid 5 wich few standard desktop boards support its late and im beat so Ill check back for an answer in the morning but if you post some more specs like what antivirus your using

norton has been know to consume up to 60% of system resources etc...
just tell us as much as you can

if your running linux you can utilize the same trick by editing your fstab and mtab file to utilize the thumb drive for your swap partition

When I started FF I had a computer with 750MB Ram. When I switched to a 2GB computer it did seem faster (but it was dual core while the first one was single).

I'm really un-educated with all of this but, I wonder if you use that ctrl-alt-delete option and watch the performance tab while a filter renders, maybe that might help you decide. I'm thinking, if you see most of your RAM (i.e. PF Usage) being used up, then you may want more RAM, but if you see you still have a fair amount of free RAM, but it's only that the CPU Usage is running high, then more RAM may not help here. (??? I'm not sure how valid this reasoning is, but it seems to make sense to me.)

Okay here are a couple tips I have used for folks in the past

1st we need to kill everything that isnt necasarry problem is thats tedious normally --ill show you the easy way

2nd we need to tell FF to run with a high priority again we will do all that with one process

next when we are done we need to restart everything we shutoff

okay we are going to make a bat file

the commands we will be using are

start
taskkill
and sc

first off in regards to what you said about norton what shows in your task manager is not nearly the whole story many of the other processes that are running have hooks from norton so for instance process A might have 5 threads running even though it shows process A not norton
a good way to find out about sub processes strings and threads is with process explorer by systernals

any how

first off
im on a linux box right now because except to update FF I never get on the internet with windows so some of this is from memory and I just woke up
in other words no coffee yet

here goes

open up notepad
open up a command line
to do the command line either go to your windows start menu and click on run
and type cmd in the window that pops up and hit enter or to get the same dialog hit the win-key and R
any how we have a command line up
I want you to type taskkill /?
the reason is if memory serves me right the switch Im looking for is I but again im 90% asleep

but one of the switches listed is for process name thats the one we want since its more difficult to find out the process number each time

next we are going to experiment
there are a bunch of processes running on your system some will kill the system if you dont know what each one does a little experimentation with your task manager is in order you might crash windows or force a reboot a time or two till you find out what ones you can kill
my personal recomendation would be to download process explorer like I mentioned since it will tell you the program that is the parent of that process

any how to make the magic work in the notepad window
lets say one program you want dead is
proga.exe
then in the notepad we would type
taskkill /I progra.exe /F

im going from memeory the f i know for sure is the force switch and the I i think is for name

any how list one after another in similar fashion

next you need to type sc query in your cmd file this will list all the services
for instance if you had program pn as a service
it would be listed here

to kill a service --and thats probably what you will have to do with most antivirus software the command is

sc stop pn
this will go in your notepad file after the taskkill list

then in your command dialog we will do a cd ..
till you get to your root directory c:\ if its your C drive

then I want you to type dir /x
this lists the dos short names of the files and folders on your system
find how program files is labeled in almost every circumstance its progra~1

so in your notepad
type
cd ..
cd ..
cd ..
cd progra~1
then do a dir /x in your command line to see how FF is listed
cd to it

and in notepad type the cd in again lets just say its filter~1
then in notepad
cd filter~1
keep going till you get to the folder with the .exe files

so now your notepad document should look like something like this

taskkill /I progra.exe /F
taskkill /I prg.exe /F
sc stop ns
sc stop dlkdjl
sc stop gjjg
cd ..
cd ..
cd ..
cd ..
cd progra~1
cd filter~1
now to start your program in high priority mode
the command is
start /high ff.exe thats not the ff exe name you will need to use the dos shortname listed by dir /x

now save this as a bat file not a txt file
when you double click it it should kill everything you didnt need

now your done with FF what a pain to restart everything

well do the reverse of above

cd to all the non windows program folders in notepad and fire the exe that you killed

sc start ns
to restart the services you killed

so in the end you should have 2 batch files
one that kills almost everything and sets FF priority high so it runs faster
and the second that restarts everything when your done

on lower end systems this can make a dramatic differenc in speed

or you can just do it the old fashioned way of using task manager to kill the ones you dont want running and service manager as well
and manually fire the programs to start over

I use theese kind of batch files on older boxes that I need to get something done on

one tweak to that is this

you might want to start FF once first to download the updates and new filters
after that close it and ad

ipconfig /release to your first batch file to turn off internet since you would be stopping your antivirus software

in the restart batch put
ipconfig /renew
at the bottom so that your antivirus software is running first

as far as hardware goes it sounds like you arnt going to get much boost from more ram

check out http://www.blackviper.com also. he's got good info on what processes to kill in xp.

jffe,

from my experience, going from 1 gig to 2 gig wont give you that much of a speed increase, but it will give you more staying power. and all that basically means is, it'll take longer before you hit the windows swap file being used as ram. in fact, if you think about it, increasing ram shldnt really give you any boost in speed. the busses and internals already limit your speed to the ratings of such. so, adding another stick doesnt increase the speed; it cant. all it can do is increase the capactity to hold stuff. and that gives a sort of increase in speed in that you may not have to access the windows swap file as soon or as often or that you can run more programs and have them interact with each other better, like FF being called from photoshop. whereas before it might have ended up calling the swap file, now it's all in ram. so, the 'increase in speed' isnt one of things moving faster in the workspace (ram); it's a matter of the workspace being larger so things can move more easily without having to go outside of it, which slows things down.