Laptop memory muddle

[~~Tides~~]

For the last couple of days my laptop has been really temermental when playing DVDs, sometimes no problems but sometimes picture is slow and jumpy.
Probably not coincidentally, I removed the module of extra RAM (1GB), as everything goes black every now and again and HP said the memory module could be to blame.
In the last couple of days the nothing has gone all black, but now I cant watch DVDs! For some reason it seems to start up faster now it has less RAM, which is ever so confusing, as I thought...

Can explain these strange happenings?

Thanks.

[blueivy]

For the last couple of days my laptop has been really temermental when playing DVDs, sometimes no problems but sometimes picture is slow and jumpy.
Probably not coincidentally, I removed the module of extra RAM (1GB), as everything goes black every now and again and HP said the memory module could be to blame.
In the last couple of days the nothing has gone all black, but now I cant watch DVDs! For some reason it seems to start up faster now it has less RAM, which is ever so confusing, as I thought...

Can explain these strange happenings?

Thanks.

The reason the DVD's will play a lot more slowly is down to the lack of memory. Windows uses what is called Virtual Memory so that if you have only 1GB of RAM, it can continue to allocate memory to programs over that 1GB by taking a bit of memory that is not used much and copying onto the disk. That space is then used by the new program. If however a program then wants that bit of memory back that Windows has copied to disk, it has to copy back into memory. It does that by finding a bit of memory that is not used much and copying it to disk and then copying the bit it copied to disk earlier back into memory and so it goes on and on and on and on ...

As the disk is the slowest part of your system, when it's copying to disk a lot it slows the system down. If you are trying to do something like watch a DVD while this copying is going on, the DVD will be slow. The solution will be to put more memory back in. The more memory you have, the less copying back and forth between memory and disk you have to do (as there is more space for everything).

If the memory was faulty as HP suggested then that is probably why it now starts up faster as it's not having to deal with the problems it caused.

Generally the less memory you have, the slower your system. Adding more memory will speed up a normal, non-problematic system. However adding more than 3GB to a 32bit system (such as Wndows XP / Vista / etc.) is pointless as it will usually not see more than that without help (although some systems will see up to 3.5GB all depending on what else you have attached to your computer).