Notebook Ram Upgrade?

UnderPressure

Morning All

OK the wife has a Compaq 110 Mini that she has had for a few years now, after much talk she still will not just get a new one she loves the little machine and wants to keep using it, recently though it has come into my tech shop (lol) with keyboard problems, there is a small break in the ribbon cable so have ordered a shiny new keyboard for it anyway I digress............

Whilst I was playing with it I noticed it is a bit of a slow beast, even with the simplest of tasks, it was originally running XP, kicked that off for Windows 7 which it ran just a little slow so when the opportunity came along to install a pre-release version of Windows 8 last November that is what I put on it, it has been running this fine but again a little on the slow side so I decided to upgrade them ram, it only has 1gb installed so thought I would look out for a 2gb upgrade, it is never going to be super quick as it uses the Atom processor but am hoping the extra gb of ram will wake it up a little.

Now here is the thing it uses DDR2 800 SO-Dimm ram, if I put this into ebay I can get a 2gb card for around a tennerish, if I put in Compaq 110c ram the price suddenly jumps upto around £25, I want a bit of clarification that if I buy a 2Gb DDR2 SO-Dimm card it will work fine? I am sure it will but just want to make sure before I order one.

Thanks in advance

oldagetraveller

Scan the machine to see what's installed and what it will take? http://www.crucial.com/uk/?cpe=pd_msn_uk
Click on the "system Scanner" tab.

NeverAgain_2

Another vote for crucial.

I upgraded my netbook from 1GB to 2GB using crucial and the process was seamless.

All I would say is I don't think the 2GB made much difference, and I read somewhere the extra memory uses extra power, which could be a problem if battery life is important to the user.

visidigi

use the above search, looks like the ebay sellers are preying on those who won't realise the ram isn't unique to the unit.

From what i see its straightforward DDR2 800mhz So DIMM, hopefully Crucial says the same (their postal service on ram is exceptional too)

UnderPressure

Thanks for the replies

Off to Crucial it is then........

fwor

I've a suspicion that the single-core Atom is more likely to be the bottleneck than a lack of memory, once you get to 1GB and beyond - though for a tenner it's got to be worth a try.

If she's not too bothered about the underlying OS (e.g. if she uses it mainly for browsing) had you thought about trying one of the lightweight Linux variants on it, such as Zorin?

Unfortunately you can't judge the performance of an OS from a LiveCD, so it would of course mean a trial installation...