John asks, "You always recommend getting more memory for your gaming computer, but how much memory is enough, and how do you know when you've got too much memory?"

There's one rule of thumb in computing: you never have enough memory. The more gigabytes of RAM you can stick into your machine, the better off you are. in fact, I just don't think you can have "too much" memory!

Games are getting larger and more resource intensive. As photo-realism starts to become a reality, the amount of memory you have both in your machine and on your video cards because extremely important. While textures are stored directly on the video card, everything else - from game logic to physics - is stored in system memory. As gaming worlds continue to grow in complexity, the need for memory will continue to grow exponentially.

Everyday users and gamers are finally latching on to the idea of proper multitasking. Gamers will not only be playing a game, but they'll also have a chat application, voice application, web browser, and e-mail open in the background. All of these programs will either take up space in system memory, or will be placed in the swap file so the game has maximum system memory available to it - and once you start swapping information to the hard rive, system response time becomes much slow, limiting your multitasking capabilities.

The simple fact is that the more memory you have - on both your video card and your main system - the more you can accomplish, whether it be multitasking, photo-realistic gaming, or a combination of both.

Do you have a question? E-mail me, lordkat@gmail.com

Be safe,
Jason