i have a pent 4 1.6 mhz with 512 ram. When i load alot of charts it slows down alot. would doubling the ram help much or is it the speed of the processor that makes the difference?
Tell us a little more about your system. How many and what kind of video cards are you running? How many monitors? Right now I'm running a big ol video card (OCed GeForce 6800) and three Matrox G450s on 7 monitors with a crapload of charts. My CPU (it's noon, so it's slow) is running at about 20% (3 ghz). My RAM is underused (1 gig). You can tell if your RAM is getting hammered because Windows (assumption here) will cache out to disk. So you'll see your hard drive light on a lot. I wouldn't recommened less than 1 gig for new systems, but 512 meg seems reasonable. To check if your CPU is pegged, pull up the task manager and look at the performance tab.
Check Task Manager and see of your CPU is being all gobbled up. If that's the case, adding RAM or faster CPU won't help much.... likely a software issue.
Does it run faster with fewer charts? With your charts up and running open Task Manager under Windows (Ctrl-Alt-Del under 2000 and XP). Go to the Performance tab. Take a look at your CPU utilization. If it is at 100% then switch to the Processes tab. Double click the CPU column to get the % of CPU utilization to be the controlling sort. Take a look at the process names. That will indicate what is loading up the CPU. Look at the Physical memory. See how much is available. If you have available physical memory (this is RAM) it is unlikely that adding RAM will help. If you don't, the Commit Charge (K) table will show that the total exceeds your physical total. You can figure out by how much. That means you are using "Paged" memory. Paged memory is an area on your hard disk that Windows uses when it runs out of RAM. Paged memory usage slows you down. Add RAM. If you are running at or near limit, close some charts and review the Task Manager again. If should reflect the changes, the amount is very program design dependent. This will give you a clue as to how much RAM you need.