Will more RAM increase or decrease the computer performance?

Answer 1

It will either have no effect (if there is enough RAM in the machine at the moment) or improve performance (if there is not enough RAM in the machine at the moment).

Therefore you could be wasting your money. Before purchasing more RAM you need to diagnose what (if anything) is the bottleneck in your computer.

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Essentially, the RAM is used to provide temporary storage for data that will be used by the processor in the computer. If there is not enough space in the RAM to store this data, the hard disk will be used to store this temporary data.

So by that logic increasing the RAM will improve the performance of your computer as accessing data from the RAM is faster that the hard disk.

However, the maximum amount of RAM that a computer can use depends on the operating system that you are using so find out the maximum amount supported and if you can afford it max out the RAM.

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Any currently running programs are stored in RAM. If there is no more room there, then they get stored in the swap buffer on the hard drive, which is a lot slower. But even if you aren`t doing anything, Windows still constantly tries to access it`s memory in the swap buffer and that slows everything down.

So when you add RAM, you give the computer more space to store the active programs and avoid dipping into swap as much.