With the price of upgrading system RAM extremely low these days, people are always asking me whether it’s really worth it to upgrade beyond 4GB; today we’ll answer that question for everybody.

More RAM Means Better Multi-Tasking

First, let’s take a moment to clarify what exactly more RAM can (and can’t) do for you. The biggest benefit of upgrading your PC’s memory is better multi-tasking, especially for those of us using RAM-hogging applications like Photoshop, Outlook, or Firefox 5 minutes after we’ve opened it. Having a lot of memory means that you can quickly switch back and forth between the different applications without Windows writing the process memory out to the pagefile. (The pagefile performs much the same purpose as RAM, but the data is stored on your much slower hard drive.) (continue reading…)