Upgrading my Laptops Memory

Butterfliesarepretty

I have an inspiron 6400 laptop from dell. Bought Jan 2008. Has windows vista. It has 1.5gb of ram and I want to upgrade say to 4gb - how do I do this and how much will it cost and ill it improve my laptop's performance?

luci

Go to https://www.crucuial.com , put in your laptop's details into the scanner and it will tell you what you need and how much it is. Then check sites like MyMemory and MrMemory to see if they are cheaper.

closed

I doubt you will notice any difference whatsoever.

Backing up your data, and reinstalling windows from the factory restore partition will improve the performance.

Hammyman

1.5GB to 4GB will provide negligble difference for normal use. It'll cost you about £60 and you can do it yourself - both memory slots are under a flap on the base - all you need is a small crosshead screwdriver.

paddyrg

I'm with there advice above, the reinstall is where you'll find the speed boost. Also,32- bit operating systems can't address the full 4GB so if 3 gb is cheaper, do that too... Mind you at just £60 you can't go far wrong anyway and you Will probably get to use25-50% of that last 4th GB, depending on your machine.

Hammyman

Now I've had sleep, the best thing to do would be to replace the 512MB DIMM with a 1GB one giving a total memory of 2GB which is the sweet spot for Vista/Win7. A 1GB DIMM will be around £17 from Crucial. Its then just a case of unscrewing the cover, taking out the 512MB one and putting the 1GB DIMM in its place.

hubert_cumberdale

go to crucials website and they can scann your machine and tell you exactly which memory set is required

its unlikely to see a performance increase

i went from 4gb to 16gb on my work machine and didnt really see much increase in speed but i added a second quad core processor and a second graphics card and its pretty quick now but i still find myself waiting ocasionally

GRM

My new work laptop has a SSD rather than a mechanical HDD. The difference in speed is amazing.

hubert_cumberdale

ssd's are going to be the future i have a ssd unit with 4 seperate volumes in totalling 2 Terrabytes (500gb x 4)ish

they are mirroring each other and the access time is immense