Ram upgrade advice

[Slumbercub]

I have a 20" iMac G5, 1.8 with 1Gb of ram. Performance is absolutely fine for almost everything but I find that things get a little laggy when using it for CAD work (Vectorworks). I guess it is the high resolution on he 20" screen that works the graphics card hardest but I was wondering if upgrading the ram would help?

I usually have Mail, Safari, Notebook2 and Filemaker and maybe iTunes running as well but none of these applications seems to suffer from lag.

Buying a couple of sticks of 1Gb ram would be far cheaper than splashing out on a new Mac (although any excuse ) and anyway I love my iMac and don't want to part with it just yet.

Has anyone noticed a performance boost from additional ram on a set up similar to mine?

 

[trainguy77]

One way to tell if you need more ram is follow these steps.

1. Restart
2. Start all applications you normally use at the same time including the CAD program.
3. Go into Activity monitor and tell us how much ram is free and how much is inactive.

 

[Slumbercub]

Here is a capture of Activity monitor which shows just under 300 MB left when I had the most programs I would normally have running whilst working.

I am guessing that there isn't really a need to upgrade, after all, unused ram is wasted ram, right?

 

[trainguy77]

Once you start working you may want more RAM.

 

[Slumbercub]

I'll see how I get on, thanks for the help.