athenian200
Gawd
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2012
- Messages
- 837
So, I have an old Toshiba Satellite (C655-S5049) with only 2GB RAM. The thing is, I don't generally buy laptops for myself and usually end up using whatever other people discard. Someone thought the machine was broken because it stopped booting into Windows and they couldn't get the OEM restore disks to work, gave it to me to throw out... but I got it working with a standard installation.
I've put some work into tweaking Windows. I've been using ReadyBoost with an 8GB Flash drive, and I went through and did a lot of things like disabling animations, Cortana, excess services, etc. After enabling ReadyBoost everything seems to speed up significantly after using the computer for about 20 minutes, although it acts really sluggish during those first 20 minutes after a reboot.
Still, Windows uses almost a full gigabyte of RAM when it starts up, and I've been looking for ways to cut it back. I could probably just drop another 2GB stick into the machine and solve a lot of the problems (it supports 4GB), but I don't really want to invest money into upgrading something with a Celeron 900. If it supported 8GB, I would probably install the maximum amount just for fun, but 4GB is kind of a boring amount... it's not small enough that I have to aggressively tweak things, but it's not large enough that I can relax about RAM usage.
The only thing I really want to do with this computer is surf the Internet and run Office. It mostly works well for that, although it could be a little snappier. I was looking at the RAM requirements, and I noticed that while I'm just barely meeting the RAM requirements for 64-bit Windows, the 32-bit version only requires 1GB. Is it safe to assume that I would cut back a lot on RAM usage with 32-bit? Or would it be roughly the same as the 64-bit version in terms of RAM use? Also, would there be a CPU speed penalty for using a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit processor?
I've put some work into tweaking Windows. I've been using ReadyBoost with an 8GB Flash drive, and I went through and did a lot of things like disabling animations, Cortana, excess services, etc. After enabling ReadyBoost everything seems to speed up significantly after using the computer for about 20 minutes, although it acts really sluggish during those first 20 minutes after a reboot.
Still, Windows uses almost a full gigabyte of RAM when it starts up, and I've been looking for ways to cut it back. I could probably just drop another 2GB stick into the machine and solve a lot of the problems (it supports 4GB), but I don't really want to invest money into upgrading something with a Celeron 900. If it supported 8GB, I would probably install the maximum amount just for fun, but 4GB is kind of a boring amount... it's not small enough that I have to aggressively tweak things, but it's not large enough that I can relax about RAM usage.
The only thing I really want to do with this computer is surf the Internet and run Office. It mostly works well for that, although it could be a little snappier. I was looking at the RAM requirements, and I noticed that while I'm just barely meeting the RAM requirements for 64-bit Windows, the 32-bit version only requires 1GB. Is it safe to assume that I would cut back a lot on RAM usage with 32-bit? Or would it be roughly the same as the 64-bit version in terms of RAM use? Also, would there be a CPU speed penalty for using a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit processor?