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You might be tempted to say “Gee, maybe I want to try this ECC RAM.” Well, don’t! To take advantage of ECC RAM, you need a motherboard with an MCC designed to use ECC. Only expensive motherboards for high-end systems use ECC. The special-use-only nature of ECC makes it fairly rare. Plenty of techs out there with years of experience have never even seen ECC RAM.

Buffered/Registered DRAM

Your average PC motherboard accepts no more than four sticks of DRAM, because more than four physical slots for sticks gives motherboard designers some serious electrical headaches. Yet some systems that use a lot of RAM need the capability to use more DRAM sticks on the motherboard, often six or eight. To get around the electrical hassles, special DRAM sticks add a buffering chip to the stick that acts as an intermediary between the DRAM and the MCC. These special DRAM sticks are called buffered or registered DRAM (Figure 6-21).

Like ECC, you must have a motherboard with an MCC designed to use this type of DRAM. Rest assured that such a motherboard has a large number of RAM slots. Buffered/registered RAM is rare (maybe not quite as rare as ECC RAM), and you’ll never see it in the typical desktop system.

Figure 6-21 Buffered DRAM

Working with RAM

Whenever someone comes up to me and asks what single hardware upgrade they can do to improve their system performance, I always tell them the same thing—add more RAM. Adding more RAM can improve overall system performance, processing speed, and stability—if you get it right. Botching the job can cause dramatic system instability, such as frequent, random crashes and reboots. Every tech needs to know how to install and upgrade system RAM of all types.

To get the desired results from a RAM upgrade, you must first determine if insufficient RAM is the cause of system problems. Second, you need to pick the proper RAM for the system. Finally, you must use good installation practices. Always store RAM sticks in anti-static packaging whenever they’re not in use, and use strict ESD handling procedures. Like many other pieces of the PC, RAM is very sensitive to ESD and other technician abuse (Figure 6-22)!

Figure 6-22 Don’t do this! Grabbing the contacts is a bad thing.

Do You Need RAM?

Two symptoms point to the need for more RAM in a PC: general system sluggishness and excessive hard drive accessing. If programs take forever to load and running programs seem to stall and move more slowly than you would like, the problem could stem from insufficient RAM. A friend with a new Windows Vista system complained that her PC seemed snappy when she first got it but takes a long time to do the things she wants to do with it, such as photograph retouching in Adobe Photoshop and document layout for a print zine she produces. Her system had only 1 GB of RAM, sufficient to run Windows Vista, but woefully insufficient for her tasks—she kept maxing out the RAM and thus the system slowed to a crawl. I replaced her stick with a pair of 2-GB sticks and suddenly she had the powerhouse workstation she desired.

Excessive hard drive activity when you move between programs points to a need for more RAM. Every Windows PC has the capability to make a portion of your hard drive look like RAM in case you run out of real RAM. This is called the page file or swap file, as you’ll recall from Chapter 4, “Understanding Windows.” If you fill your RAM up with programs, your PC automatically starts loading some programs into the page file. You can’t see this process taking place just by looking at the screen—these swaps are done in the background. But you will notice the hard drive access LED going crazy as Windows rushes to move programs between RAM and the page file in a process called disk thrashing. Windows uses the page file all the time, but excessive disk thrashing suggests that you need more RAM.

You can diagnose excessive disk thrashing through simply observing the hard drive access LED flashing or through various third-party tools. I like FreeMeter (www.tiler .com/freemeter/).