Thinking about upgrading my 4GB to 8GB...

Does slotting more RAM improve performance ?

I'm finding my RAM is up to about 90% when I run Lord of the Rings with Chrome open too.  Had blue screens a couple of times, I'm thinking I am running out of RAM.

With nothing running my RAM use is 40%, roughly 1600MB of 4085MB.  Is that high ?  Should I be looking for processes that I don't need ?

Thanks for any advice.

BTW my RAM is old now and no longer available.  I found a 4GB set on eBay though of matching RAM so might get that.  It's £50.00

Never good to hear that a computer is giving blue screens, think we should try to track down that problem first, so I wouldn't get that RAM just yet Freddy, I have some things I need to do now but will post back later.

Running out of RAM shouldn't give you BSOD, so when do you get the BSOD, is it when you are gaming?

It's not happening a lot, usually it's when I am doing numerous things at the same time - I will press a key and blip it all cuts out.  I probably had  three BSODs last month.  Not a biggie considering the PC is on all day long.

This last time was when Lotro was running and Chrome at the same time as well as my auction sniper.  So a lot going on at once.  Usually I am only running just the game and occasionally Chrome when I need maps and stuff.  The sniper is rarely on at the same time as all this.

When I am doing all that my RAM usage goes pretty high like I said, 80-90%.

The PC shouldn't have any problems if it gets low on RAM, windows will just use the HDD, which will be much slower but will not BSOD.

BSOD are nearly always caused by faulty hardware, RAM, graphics card and Mobo being the most common so on that thought try this memory tool, test the RAM a good few times and see if that brings up anything.

http://hcidesign.com/memtest/    

Okay, I can't do it right away.  I was just thinking maybe it's the graphics card over heating ?

Anyway one thing at a time...

Probably won't be until tomorrow now as I have a meet up on Lotro tonight.

Will let you know and many thanks

It could be the graphics card, not sure about it overheating, you tend to get artefacts and strange things appearing on screen in games when they overheat, however running a card close to overheating will eventually kill it.

Do run that memory test, it doesn't need installing, just run the exe, its perfectly safe, have used it to track down problems in the past.

I only have 4 GIG here too and although I get close to using all the RAM sometimes I don't get that annoying memory paging from the HDD which is a sure sign you need more RAM (and im running some of the latest games in max quality), so personally I don't think you would notice much improvement, 8 GIG would be a nice buffer zone though.

If the mem test doesn't come up with anything we will look at your dump log (that don't sound right  ) 

Ok well I ran that test for about an hour and it threw no errors.

That's good then, there doesn't seem to be a memory problem.

Send me your last dump file, they are located here:

C:\Windows\Minidump\Minidump.dmp

Zip up the most resent and attach it to this thread, once I have it I will remove it from the thread just in case. 

Here you go...

Here is the report, it seems to be a direct X problem, in short I know it says its probably not hardware at fault but you cant totally believe that, It could be the graphics card, but the first thing I would do is put in the latest driver for the card.

If I come up with anything else I will post.

On Thu 01/12/2011 14:26:21 GMT your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\120111-17144-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: dxgmms1.sys (dxgmms1+0x37D38)
Bugcheck code: 0x3B (0xC0000005, 0xFFFFF88004437D38, 0xFFFFF88007880790, 0x0)
Error: SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION
file path: C:\Windows\system32\drivers\dxgmms1.sys
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: DirectX Graphics MMS
Bug check description: This indicates that an exception happened while executing a routine that transitions from non-privileged code to privileged code.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem.
The crash took place in a standard Microsoft module. Your system configuration may be incorrect. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver on your system which cannot be identified at this time.

My driver dated back to 19/04/11 - time has gone so fast I never thought to update it.

Now I have a driver from Sapphire that came out last month.

So I'll have to see how that goes, thanks very much mate 

Yeah that driver of yours is a bit on the old side so It's worth a try and hopefully that will solve the problem but if it doesn't I'm getting the feeling that new graphics card might be on the cards soon than later. 

Something else you could try if you keep getting the BSOD is to remove the card and clean up the slot on the MOBO with a brush and also give the card itself a good clean, it might be getting full of dust around the fan and heatsink or it might not be making a perfect connection in the slot.

OKay I will see how this goes then,  I might take a look inside and see how bad it is in there and give it a clean if needed.

I'll give the graphics card priority over the RAM to.

Many thanks