Yes, if you're doing a lot of memory intensive things on your computer, it's nice to have extra RAM available. Just make sure you kill them when you game so you don't periodically lag.
Meh I am actually having trouble playing Battlefield 1942, the fps is just going up and down, and my HD is having a hard time, perhaps it is time to double my amount of RAM: 512 to 1024, and turn off virtual memory to leave the poor HD alone...
I was having a problem with virtual memory HD accesses making Doom 3 stutter. It turns out my HD was dying. I changed the virtual memory paging file to my other (non-dying) HD and the problem disappeared. Also, you shouldn't disable virtual memory. The system will always try to use your RAM if you have it.
One thing you can do to check if it is indeed a memory problem is Ctrl-Alt-Del then bring up "Performance" then run the game in a window. If the available physical memory gets really low and you start seeing HD accesses, then it's a HD/memory problem. If not, it's probably a driver/video card/processor problem
Comments
if you want to see status bars go up, just play progressquest or something.
One thing you can do to check if it is indeed a memory problem is Ctrl-Alt-Del then bring up "Performance" then run the game in a window. If the available physical memory gets really low and you start seeing HD accesses, then it's a HD/memory problem. If not, it's probably a driver/video card/processor problem