Compatibility of old(ish) Software with Windows 7

[Harding, Dan]

"I think buying more than 4GB of RAM would be a waste of money for most tech writers."

I disagree 100%. It's not just the specific application(s) you run, but also how you work, that determines how much RAM is useful.

If you only ever run a single word-processing application, then yes, more would be a waste. However, if you are a rampant multitasker, as I am, where you have a desktop pub application, word processing, Excel, a half dozen browser windows, etc., running simultaneously, system RAM is essential for responsiveness and to avoid virtual memory swapping.

IMO, there are 3 main things one can do to breathe life into older desktop computer hardware to make it feel more responsive:

1. Upgrade the OS to 64-bit, in conjunction with:
2. Increase RAM, if supported, to 8GB or 16GB*
3. Replace the boot drive with an SSD. This one single upgrade, more than any other, can result in doubling or tripling the apparent speed of a computer system, due to the minimized seek times that SSDs offer. SSDs are no longer nearly as pricey on a per-GB basis as they once were.

I've taken 5+ year old laptops and desktops, swapped in SSDs, and people thought they got new computers... it's THAT big of an improvement.

* Be careful on the RAM limitations depending on the version of Windows you have installed. Microsoft made the consumer-unfriendly decision with Windows 7 that you needed to have Windows 7 Professional rather than Home to access more than 16GB of RAM. This restriction was removed in Windows 8.

Dan Harding
Technical Editorial Specialist
University of Illinois Tax School
419 Mumford Hall
1301 West Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801
217-333-0935


-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Robert Lauriston
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2014 12:50 PM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Compatibility of old(ish) Software with Windows 7

I think buying more than 4GB of RAM would be a waste of money for most tech writers.

The only thing I've done in my work where I've needed more than 4GB is testing server applications with large memory footprints. The rest of the time I'm not using even half my 4GB.

Outside of work I run music software that's extremely memory-intensive and 4GB on 32-bit is not a bottleneck.

On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 3:40 PM, Syed Zaeem Hosain
(Syed.Hosain at aeris.net) <Syed.Hosain at aeris.net> wrote:
> On a modern computer/laptop of the past few years, which are usually fully 64-bit capable and _usually_ have more than 4GB of main memory, installing Windows 7 32-bit is silly and wasteful. You end up not using the memory above 4GB (actually, less, since the graphics cards and stuff also take up some of the low-memory in a 32-bit OS load), etc., etc., etc.
_______________________________________________


You are currently subscribed to framers as dharding at illinois.edu.

Send list messages to framers at lists.frameusers.com.

To unsubscribe send a blank email to
framers-unsubscribe at lists.frameusers.com
or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/dharding%40illinois.edu

Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.