RAM settings in my PC & best laptop for production?

[xenomachino]

Allright, this is the deal, i have 2.75 gigs of ram in my pc. what the hell do i set the initial size and the maximum size to? Everyone has a different opinion on this, just wanted to know what you guys think. Also is the slot order for the ram important? I have four slots, 2 with 1 giga, one with 512 and one with 256.

I have an HP with cpu of 3.2 gigas with (hyperthreading technology), which gets overloaded all the time. I just don't believe it should happen with all the ram I have, but then again, that has to do more with the cpu. I guess i need to move on to a dual core or something. Anyway, enough rambling, any thoughts?

By the way, what is the absolute best music production laptop that money can buy???????

[longjohns]

it sounds like you might be talking about paging file size settings? with that much ram, you could even try not having a paging file at all. if you do, you should ideally have it on a different drive from your windows installation. maybe set it for min 2G max 2G.

assuming you have DDR ram, you need to have matched sticks to have dual channel working. if your two 1G sticks are exactly the same, use them in two slots which are the same color (though you should read your motherboard manual to make sure you are putting them in the right slots. my understanding is that by putting the other two sticks in, you're killing dual channel operation. so you've got 768mb more memory, but all 2.75G is running AT LEAST half as fast as the 2 x 1G sticks would alone. (even slower if either of the other sticks are slower rated memory) so you're probably best ditching the extra memory

i think you should consider disabling hyperthreading. i just did and it helped about 5% on the live performance benchmark on my machine

[sqook]

Christ, there is no way that your machine doesn't have enough horsepower to run live5. Set your paging file size to 1Gb and make it static. With 2Gb of ram, it's unlikely that your OS will even use it, but hell, might as well keep it around anyways.

And as the previous poster suggested, keeping it on a separate disk from your audio samples will improve performance as well.