Ok, time for a long one from me, and I haven't done this in a looooong time.
First to make something clear, I work as a Computer Technician and part of my job is to assemble, configure, maintain and repair Personal Computers (PC's
). That means, that everything I say here will be based on my working experience only (about 5 years altogether). My native language is not English and I never worked in any English company so the terms I will use may not be 100% accurate if read by some American/English Technicians. I'll just try to translate them the best I can and simplify it so that anyone can read and understand what I am saying.
I would like to answer the original question first (the one about RAM). As far as RAM goes more is better, but to the limit. It heavily depends on system you use on your PC. In general, older (M$) systems have worse RAM management then the newer ones. So if you use WIN 95, WIN 98, WIN 98SE you will have much worse performance from your RAM then you would get from WIN 2000 or WIN XP. Let me explain something on how WIN 98(SE) uses RAM. By default (meaning if the program running doesn't instruct system otherwise) the applications that are no longer active are not unloaded from RAM and still take space. So, sooner or later (depends on you amount of RAM) you RAM will be filled and the virtual memory usage (large disk access and slowdowns) will pop up. So, a 128 MB RAM system will get, after a while, lots of Hard Disk activity and slowdowns. OTOH a 512 MB of RAM system will still get large HDD activity and slowdowns, but it will take much longer for that to happen. On WIN95-98 system adding more ram will effectively just buy you more time before you get slowdowns. This is definitely not good memory management, and this is mostly the reason why you occasionally need to reboot your system to get better performance.
There is a utility I have come across (no I don't work for that company of for the Microsoft
). Its called Cache Manager. This utility fixes that memory management problem I was talking about. It frees up memory from inactive applications, shows you available RAM, manages your system Cache (closely connected to system performance) and defragments your RAM so that it is utilised more effectively. It also doesn't take any significant (noticeable) system resources since it is small, and mostly inactive (it just monitors your current available RAM and activates itself only when available RAM drops below a point). The usage is very simple as well. The wizards handle most of the functions, and all you need is just to use the defaults in order to get going. This little program works on all systems but is almost essential for those that use WIN 95-98. I use this one for more than a year and I NEVER had any problems with it (I used it on WIN 98SE and WIN XP Pro at my home).
The link is:
http://www.outertech.com
As far as system discussions go, in my experience Win XP is the best M$ system so far (sorry Fyron
). For home Users second best is Win 98 SE.
Win ME I would recommend to my enemies, and only to my enemies.
.
Win 95 is so old and is in no way better then Win 98 SE so all Win 95 Users should upgrade their systems, unless they have any special reasons for keeping it (like having some custom applications that are specifically designed for Win 95). It's hard for me to compare Win 2000 and Win XP since I am not Network Administrator and my knowledge there is limited, but I personally prefer Win XP since it has much better multimedia support and is completely 32bit based system (that can be both good and bad, depends on the programs you use and personal preferences), even more then Win 2000. As far as I can tell change from Win 2000 to Win XP is evolutionary more then revolutionary. I am using Win XP for a few months now on my home PC and I am more then happy with it (meaning I will not get back to Win 98SE I had installed before).
Btw. AFAIK (from other sources) the difference between Win XP home and professional Versions is just in network security so any other comparisons for common user (gamer) seem pointless. OS may not cause all the lockups and slowdowns. Mostly, the lockups are caused by hardware malfunction or hardware incompatibility (2 PC components may not work together), or just by bad driver or program (Warcraft 3 is perfect example. The original Version from CD would cause Win XP to reboot occasionally, so they issued a patch that fixed it. This was programs fault, not OS fault). So if you have system that locks up with Win 2000, it may be some other reason then OS. At work I DID have LOTS of problems with Win 2000, but they were mostly caused by bad driver support from manufacturers.
There, my rumble ends.