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Upgrading Laptop RAM

HRC99

HRC99

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Just wondered if there was anyone out there who had upgraded their laptop RAM?

My laptop is creaking a bit and running a bit slowly. I can double the RAM memory from 2Gb to 4Gb for about £35 and wondered if anyone knew whether this would be worthwhile?
 
Just wondered if there was anyone out there who had upgraded their laptop RAM?

My laptop is creaking a bit and running a bit slowly. I can double the RAM memory from 2Gb to 4Gb for about £35 and wondered if anyone knew whether this would be worthwhile?
Click to expand...

According to all the blurb, increasing RAM memory should speed things up a bit when carrying out multi applications. I've upgraded the memory in 2 or 3 of my desktops in the past but if I'm honest didn't notice any discernable difference.
But I'm no expert.
 
best upgrade speedwise for a laptop is to get a solid state hard drive, these are super quick but a little pricey

depends what o/s you have with regards ram, 2gb is a fair amount tbh unless running windows7 in which case I would go for the 4gb as it uses a fair bit just to run.
 
Can you advise make and age of machine, How much RAM it has at the moment and what Operating System it has.

Also a note of the CPU would be useful

If you click start, RIGHT click My Computer, hit Properties
a box comes up with most of that info

I'll be happy to advise

Fragger

Computer Hero To The Gentry
 
Can you advise make and age of machine, How much RAM it has at the moment and what Operating System it has.

Also a note of the CPU would be useful

If you click start, RIGHT click My Computer, hit Properties
a box comes up with most of that info

I'll be happy to advise

Fragger

Computer Hero To The Gentry
Click to expand...

Fragger

Here you go!

Toshiba Tecra A9
Windows Vista Business - SP2
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00Ghz
2GB Ram

Cheers! :)
 
Toshiba Tecra A9
Windows Vista Business - SP2
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00Ghz
2GB Ram

Cheers! :)
Click to expand...

You can only get 800mhz RAM for that, see what you currently have and match it speed wise (or replace both with 800 if you can). I am pretty sure laptop DDR2 does not go about 800 for that model.

Max is also 4gb. I would say to get a good speed up get a solid state hard drive, decent size is about £250 (over 150GB)

Windows 7 will also be a speed increase at a cost of about £70. Upgrading should be pretty easy.

Best thing to do would be to buy the new ram, the SSD and windows 7 and do a fresh install of the OS. Any decent laptop (post Pentium 4) will be lightning fast with that setup!
 
Can you advise make and age of machine, How much RAM it has at the moment and what Operating System it has.

Also a note of the CPU would be useful

If you click start, RIGHT click My Computer, hit Properties
a box comes up with most of that info

I'll be happy to advise




Fragger

Computer Hero To The Gentry
Click to expand...

Fragger

Here you go!

Toshiba Tecra A9
Windows Vista Business - SP2
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00Ghz
2GB Ram

Cheers! :)
Click to expand...

The minimum amount of RAM for a vista system is 2Gb so the more you can throw in it the better.

as Scienceboy said, 4Gb at 800Mhz is the max you can put in

You have 2 RAM slots under a small panel underneath the laptop., You might have 1 x 2GB stick, in which case you just need to order another chip the same, But I suspect that you have 2 x 1Gb which you will have to remove and buy a 4 Gb matched pair. This will cost about £48. You should be able to ebay the old chips for about £15-20

go to www.crucial.com/uk and download their scanner.

This will make some difference, but Vista is your main issue here, Replacing it with Windows 7 would be about £80 and you would need to backup all your data, wipe the hard drive and basically start from scratch.

Your CPU is ok, but is never going to set the world on fire
I guess its 2 1/2 years old approx

Is it worth doing this and /or getting a solid state hard drive?

Lets do the maths

Ram £48 Worth doing , cost effective upgrade

Ram + Win7 cost £128 If you are going to keep the laptop and can do the reformat yourself then its a viable option.
If you have to pay someone to do it, then its probably not an option

Ram + Win7 + Solid State Drive = £378 ish... I wouldnt bother Id rather buy a new lappy with an intel I5 CPU and win7 pre installed with 4 GB RAm.

Shout me back if you need any more help

Fragger
 
HRC. Once you get to 2gb on any personal operating system for normal use, it is a case of diminishing returns and the default barier of 3gb is a consideration. That said, there is a /PAE switch you can put into the system config that will allow usage of up to 4gb ram.
A laptop with 2gb or 3gb will benchmark very close together. The best thing to do is to clear the clutter and optomise what you have, best of all, its free.

Download CCleaner and run it, this will clear out months of junk and caches that will make your pc feel laggy. Give it a go first before paying for ram.
 
Download CCleaner and run it, this will clear out months of junk and caches that will make your pc feel laggy. Give it a go first before paying for ram.
Click to expand...

I have CCleaner and use it quite regularly but my laptop is still showing signs of age and slowing down. Hence, the thought about extra RAM.
 
I'm no expert but isn't 3gb the maximum 'useable' memory in a 32 bit machine, or is that an urban myth?
Click to expand...

I think XP may only be able to address 3GB, I dont think it matters whether its a 32 bit machine.
Click to expand...

The limit with 32bit is 4GB although in reality it's about 3.75 because some of that gets reserved.

GEEK BIT!
Each bit can hold a value of 1 or 0.
With a 32bit system that gives you 2^32 (2 to the power of 32) unique values, which are used to address each byte of memory.

So 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes
Which is 4096MB or 4GB.

With a 64 bit system in theory you could address 2^64 bytes (although I don't think Windows can currently do this).

That's 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes.
or 16,777,216TB (a lot of memory to you and me!)
 
The minimum amount of RAM for a vista system is 2Gb so the more you can throw in it the better.

as Scienceboy said, 4Gb at 800Mhz is the max you can put in

You have 2 RAM slots under a small panel underneath the laptop., You might have 1 x 2GB stick, in which case you just need to order another chip the same, But I suspect that you have 2 x 1Gb which you will have to remove and buy a 4 Gb matched pair. This will cost about £48. You should be able to ebay the old chips for about £15-20

go to www.crucial.com/uk and download their scanner.

This will make some difference, but Vista is your main issue here, Replacing it with Windows 7 would be about £80 and you would need to backup all your data, wipe the hard drive and basically start from scratch.

Your CPU is ok, but is never going to set the world on fire
I guess its 2 1/2 years old approx

Is it worth doing this and /or getting a solid state hard drive?

Lets do the maths

Ram £48 Worth doing , cost effective upgrade

Ram + Win7 cost £128 If you are going to keep the laptop and can do the reformat yourself then its a viable option.
If you have to pay someone to do it, then its probably not an option

Ram + Win7 + Solid State Drive = £378 ish... I wouldnt bother Id rather buy a new lappy with an intel I5 CPU and win7 pre installed with 4 GB RAm.

Shout me back if you need any more help

Fragger
Click to expand...

Thanks for all of that. I could certainly do a reformat and reinstall without too much bother. I think I'll take it step by step.

First the RAM, I've found it on Play.com for £17.99 for "Kingston KVR667D2S5/2G ValueRAM / 2GB / 667MHz / PC5300 DDR2 / 200pin SODIMM / Laptop Memory" which seems a decent price.

I'll see if that makes a difference and then look at Windows 7. As you say it's not really worth going Solid State as it'd be better to buy a new laptop.

Thanks for all your help and I'll report back in a few days.
 
OK. Lots of interesting replies.

I have a Compaq vista business laptop which I upgraded from 1-2gb. The difference was/is huge. My Vista installation and other apps uses a constant 1.1gb, that's with some start-up processes halted.

Vista was supposed to be able to run on 1gb, it might on a fresh/clean install, but 2gb min is the way to go. If I wanted to upgrade to 3 or 4, it wouldn't do much. Doubling up from 2 to 4 would show some improvement IF you are running at a high constant level and are are maxing out from time to time. If you open task manager and click on performance you'll see how things look. I've just done it and am on 5% CPU and 1.1gb RAM.

With regard to 32-bit systems, there seems to be quite a bit of disagreement t.b.h. I've read 3.25 max and reckon that's a good (although not always accurate) assumption.

...."if you have 4GB of physical RAM installed, Windows is only able to report a portion of the physical 4GB of RAM (ranges from ~2.75GB to 3.5GB depending on the devices installed, motherboard's chipset & BIOS)."

My new windows 7 (pro) PC has 4 gb installed and the system recognises 3.5. It's FAST. It also boots in under 30 seconds, which is way faster than any other windows PC I use.

Bottom line - the most impressive performance gains will be on a computer which is using most of the RAM just by sitting there running an operating system.

2gb is plenty for Vista unless you have a load of stuff (iPod, camera, apps) which is helping itself to your resources.

I run XP and Ubuntu (dual boot) on 1gb
Vista on 2gb
Windows 7 on 4gb (overkill!)
Also, I run Linux mint 10 netbook on 512mb.... :) 12 seconds from start-up to internet.
My work Power Mac has 8gb!
 
best upgrade speedwise for a laptop is to get a solid state hard drive, these are super quick but a little pricey
Click to expand...

I'm toying with the idea. Considering cloning my 50gb windows 7 to a SSD and using the installed HDD for storage.
 
Oh b.t.w.

I ran my laptop for a day directly from the RAM (Linux again) just to experience the "future". FABULOUS.

I was considering recommending SSDs for some work PCs. I found a case study on the Kingston website.

"Fully loaded" desktop PC with HDD from off - ready (network and internet) = 1 min 45 seconds.
The same but with SSD = 40 seconds. I thought it would be quicker. Then again, are most work PCs turned fully shut down?
 
Upgraded to 4Gb Ram and it's like I've got a new laptop. It's flying and such a relief after getting slower and slower over the months.

£35.98 was the cost and I'll probably pop the RAM that I took out on eBay and see if I can get any money back for them.

Delighted! :D
 
Upgraded to 4Gb Ram and it's like I've got a new laptop. It's flying and such a relief after getting slower and slower over the months.

£35.98 was the cost and I'll probably pop the RAM that I took out on eBay and see if I can get any money back for them.

Delighted! :D
Click to expand...

Good news. Makes a huge difference if you are "topping out" with your existing ram.
 
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