Ideal RAM?

Hey. i'm finally going to upgrade my ram after having only 512 for a couple of years now. as you can imagine i'm incredibly tired of slow performance; right now AA2.0 is practically unusable. anyway, what would you guys recommend? i know most people are aiming for 2gb or higher but... i dont exactly have money to burn. even another 512mb will cost around $140(CAD). will adding 512 to 512 be ok?

there's two 256s on the board now and two other slots available. i'm also, at the same time, upgrading my graphics card to the BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GS OC 512MG AGP.

thanks.

Crucial is the big dog when it comes to RAM.... http://www.crucial.com/

The amount of RAM you are talking about went out with dial-up internet! It's 5 years ago. Today you will need minimum 1GB RAM and many have 2GB, I had 4GB put into my new machine 3 months ago. The RAM slots you are talking about suggest to me that you need a new computer with a much faster Intel processor capable of taking much more RAM. But do have this conversation with Crucial, they are excellent. The first question will be "What processor do you have?" .. just right-click > Properties on My Computer and you will see the information for your processor.

I did the system scan on that site and came up with (for memory) DDR PC2700,DDR PC3200,DDR PC4000 with a maximum of 1GB per slot. basically, its best to go for a gig.

Simply put, it's best to have as much as you can handle.  There's no such thing as "too much RAM".

XP doesn't support more than 3GB without playing tricks, and IMHO that's more than a normal person needs running normal apps.

I have 1.5Gb in my DAW and never look for more.  It's RARE that I exceed 1GB of RAM utilization.  That will vary depending on the plugins being used - my heaviest work does not happen in AA, so I may not be the best roll model.

XP supports 4GB of RAM.

After 1GB RAM you don't really notice any speed difference, more RAM allows you to have more programs running and for longer without slow-downs.

yeah, i decided on 1gb. my board has 4 slots but if there's no noticable difference after 1gb, then 1.5gb should be fine.

 

For what it's worth, I have just finished tracking and mixing an album in AA2.0, on a machine that was built around an Athlon XP2800+ processor and 1GB RAM.
I had songs with 25 tracks of 48k/32bit audio, and around 18-20 plugins.
Never used all the RAM.
Serious.
Hard drives? Now, THAT'S another story. They were crappin' out all over the place 'cause they couldn't serve up the data fast enough.
But yeah, 1GB of RAM seemed to be plenty.
When I was having trouble with the audio dropping out during the mixing stage, I was checking everything on the system to see if there was anything I could do to improve the performance, but the RAM was never the issue. I think the most I saw get used was around 600MB.