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My two cents:
My brother-in-law just bought a 32 MB SO-DIMM from the Chip Merchant.
Kudos to them: about 6 weeks ago, he asked them for the 32 MB
SO-DIMM. At that time, they said they didn't carry it. So, he
settled for the 16 MB. But, their Web page does show a part number
for the 32 MB SO-DIMM at $355. When he pointed it out to them, about
2 weeks ago, they gave him a credit for the 16 MB and sent him
the 32 SO-DIMM without waiting for him to return the 16 SO-DIMM. They
did nick him $15 for a restocking fee.
However, the performance of the 701 with Win95 seems to improve
markably when running the same apps with 16 (+8) vs. 32 (+8). We've
run two 701s side by side. There is minimal to no disk caching with
the 32 MB upgrade.
The situation where too much RAM memory slows down a system can occur
with the definition of the size of the disk cache. To me, the
classical example of this is with OS/2. OS/2 by default will allocate
a disk cache that is typically 2x the RAM size. This is great for
OS/2 boxes with something like 16-24 MB of RAM. In the good old days
of expensive RAM, this made sense. When RAM prices crashed last year,
and I splurged on RAM for my OS/2 box and pushed
the RAM to 64 (an excessively silly amount), the performance noticably
degraded. Why? Because the disk cache grew to 128 MB. Once I forced
the disk cache back down to 32 MB, performance went back up. Win95
does something similar. But I don't understand lots of things
with Win95.
Hope this helps...
Mitchell
______________________________ Reply Separator
_________________________________ Subject: 16 v 32 on TP (was: Third
Party Memory for the TP701)
Author: ross@math.hawaii.edu (David Ross) at Internet Date:
3/19/97 10:10 AM
Randy Whittle writes:
> difference. I posted sometime back that according to Norton
Utilities, my > base Win 95 setup (with the little extras loaded, like
Norton Navigator
> utils) uses up something like 30 MB RAM just by booting up and
sitting > there without any additional software loaded. The Win 95
kernel alone
> (without *any* fancy stuff--i.e., networking capability) takes up 12
MB RAM.
What is NU really reporting here? I've run Win95 w/only 8 megs, and
while it is sometimes horribly slow, at other times it runs fine w/no
HD access visible. A fair fraction of this kernel must therefore be
fairly irrelevant, and Windows must be smart enough to page it to disk
and keep it there. (Good grief, I've just used 'Windows' and 'smart'
in a sentence not containing the word 'not'!)
The reason I raised the question is that the price difference between
a 16 meg dimm and a 32 meg dimm is very substantial, and to me
wouldn't be worthwhile unless software actually ran faster at times
other than when it was being loaded. (Common 'wisdom' on
comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips is that too much memory can actually
slow a system down! I don't know whether to believe it.)
- David