Adding Memory in Vista

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This might be more of a hardware question, but adding memory to Vista machines is something I’m doing a lot.

In a DDR2 system, memory works faster in pairs. What happens, on balance, when someone adds a third 1 GB dimm to a Vista system?

Memory speed slows, but I now have 3GB rather than 2GB. Is this a waste of money/memory?

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It would depend on your specific motherboard and how it handles memory. Find and read it’s spec sheet r/t memory configs.
Memory is best purchesed in pairs, triplicate or quadruplet. Whatever the configuration(s) your board accepts.
Unmatched memory will always default to the slowest speed, that’s why it’s best to purchase in pairs, trip, or quad.
If you can get a decent deal on memory I wouldn’t say that’s a waste of money, DDR2 should be decently priced over it’s DDR3 superior.

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I guess there is no easy answer to that, I suppose, unless supported by actual testing. I would think that, overall, you could expect to see some improvement in performance, if now your usage of the system usually requires the operating system to move things from memory to disk, as you load and switch from one app to another. RAM is usually seem as the cheapest way to speed up a system, but that will only happen if you are already taxiing your system to a point where disk swapping is taking place. With Vista, there is a rather good likelihood, I would say, that the extra GB will actually help more than it will hurt. Disk is still way more slow than the supposed decrease in performance that can come from using an isolated memory chip to a system. However, only testing with each system can actually confirm it.

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Yeah, I’m thinking slow RAM is still a lot faster than any HDD page file.

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