Previously I’ve written about how adding memory to your computer is the cheapest and fastest way to get a performance boots from it.  You can read the article here.  Recently I’ve upgraded the memory on my own PC from 2Gb to 4Gb, so I thought I’d share the findings with you here.

To get a good review of this I started with only 1Gb of memory in the machine and each time I started the machine from cold (ie. completely switched off).  Each time, the test was how many seconds it took before I got a ‘working’ desktop.  The results are below.

1Gb – 1 minutes 33 seconds

2Gb – 1 minute 14 seconds

4Gb – 59½ seconds

With each lot of additional memory Windows is speedier too.  I don’t have proper benchmarking software but the start-up time is a good indication of how things run after that.  Memory hungry applications such as Windows Media Centre are now running considerably faster with the additional memory installed.

The results are a clear demonstration of how impressive speed gains can be achieved from, and this is the good news, 1Gb of memory can now be bought for as little as £15 including VAT.

Remember that it’s only worth upgrading past 3Gb if you are running a 64 bit version of Windows.  The 32 bit versions and all versions of XP can only see a maximum of 4Gb which includes the memory on your graphics card.