would too much ram make ur computer slow down?

my friend has 1.2g thinderbird, 512mb ram,

via mainboard, geforce 2 , 40gb maxter hard d

and winME installed. but it wastes a lot of

resource when he play games, and they skip

and delay also. but he used to play without

any skipping on his old computer. and the

other day i heard someone say that too much

ram might cause the problem, is this true?

Personally I don't believe it. It's true for some old Intel's chipset motherboards.
The question is what Win ME (9X) works badly with memory being compared with other OSes like WinNT(Win2000).

I'd make sure that there isn't any 'extra' programs running in the systray.

With Win9x, anything above 64Mb of RAM would not significantly increase system speed. It did however allow more processes to be launched at the same time ("multitasking").

It is true that WinNT and Win2K manage RAM in a much better fashion, but I am unsure if WinME had any improvementes in this regard over Win9x.

As a general rule, the more RAM the better. DO check your system tray or any other applications which may be launching at startup that would account for system slowdown.

The usual chekups also apply for system slowdowns: Badly configured or overactive antivirus program, TSR programs that are no longer needed, badly fragmented hard disks, etc.

The problem could be that if you have one 32meg ram and added a second 32meg of a different type. That might slow your system down. Generally you don't want to mix and match ram...

Win 9x cuts off caching of RAM at anything past 128MB. I'm not sure if this is true with WinMe, but since it's based on the 9x kernel, I'd imagine it's the same. What that means is that it WILL make use of memory beyond that barrier, but it will not be cached, slowing it down a bit. More of a design limitation than a design flaw, since Billy boy never thought anyone would need more than 64 Kilobytes of RAM when he developed the 9x kernel. But it should still run FASTER than with 512MB than it did before, even if 9x can't manage memory as well as 2K.

Anyway, like Lycia said, make sure that you are using the same type of memory. Are they both PC100 or PC133? CAS3 or CAS2? In fact, I've always made sure that I'm using the exact same brand, but then again I'm just superstitious like that.

Also, try adding the following line to your system.ini file, right under the (386enh) section -

ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1

That tells ME to use all available physical memory in the system before going to the swap file. Even if it doesn't solve the problem, it should at least give a bit of a performance boost.

See this article about effects of more/less/interleaving ram on the VIA Chipsets. Its very interesting...

If you are running Windows 2000, it could be your video card, as my friend is running a similar config, but games only run smooth under win9x.

Burn

I really don't think that the problems your friend have are RAM related..

my guess would be a bad driver or corrupted dll file.

try to reinstall drivers such as display and sound.

also make sure the AGP aperture size is set to 256 (since you have 512MB)