RAM upgrade question

[mike4287]

I currently have 1 GB (2x512) of DDR PC2-5200 memory in my laptop. I was looking around to upgrade the memory and used a websites lookup tool to see the possible options. It says my laptop can support up to 2GB of RAM so I was thinking about doing this. What I am wondering is if I upgrade from my old size of RAM to (what I was thinking about) 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 800, would I see any significant amount of performance increase or would it just be a waste of time?

Thanks for any info/help!

[CWB]

bumping the ram up to the 800/6400 X 2gig will help things out .

it will be most noticeable if you have multiple programs running and/or heavy number crunching .
some laptops do not have dedicated video memory or use a combination of some dedicated video memory and some system ram . you will be gaining in this department if your machine is one of these types .
XP itself can use 1 gig to run efficiently ... a lot of techs recommend 2 gigs for vista .

it is a fair jump in speeds from 5200 to 6400 .
double check to make sure that the FSB in your machine will be able to address the new ram at that speed else wise the machine will address the ram at the highest speed the fsb is capable of (up to the 6400 level of course) .
some manufacturers set up ther comp to address the ram at a lower speed than it is actually capable of doing ... this is usually done for stability "fudge factor" reasons .
you may have to go into the bios settings and manually select the higher speed ... this depends on the motherboard and bios .
check around some of the forums for your laptop and see how others faired with upgrading ... it could save you some time and money .

[donz]

/agree

[siopawman]

more RAM would definitely improve overall performance.

but if you're just going to use your laptop for usual office documents, 1gb is enough for the work load.

[mike4287]

Thanks for all the help so far.

I usually do quite a bit of things on my laptop at a time. I'm in college for engineering so I spend a lot of time using Office for writing up reports and such, but at the same time I usually have an instant messenger or two running, some Firefox windows open for browsing or just wasting time and playing games, every now and then I open my Thunderbird to check e-mail and also have multiple folders open to find and move some files. I also like to watch videos now and then on here as well. Most of the time my taskbar is pretty much packed with things running.

I got a little more information if it would help out. I currently have a Gateway CX2726 Tablet Notebook with an Intel Core Duo processor that runs at 1.6 GHz. As far as the mobo, I found that it has a 533MHz FSB, Intel 945GM Chipset. I was looking on Newegg.com and found this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231118

I was talking it over with a friend and said that was a good brand. It was either them or Crucial, but both seem to be rated pretty good.

[michaeljohn]

I finally upgraded my RAM. I can take 1 gig, with two 512 sticks. I had 256 MB RAM and everything crawled as soon as I multi-tasked. I added 512 MB in the second slot, will upgrade the 256 later. So far, big difference in performance.

[CWB]

weeelll ...
you can't go wrong for the price .
it looks like you went with the 4200 to match your buss speed .
if you can get some ram that is a little faster it will help hedge the bet on stability .
have you checked to see if your comp is capable of being overclocked a tad ?
some machines are locked down ... the bios and cpu work together on this . basically , the bios is told by the cpu the maximum clock rate it is designed to run at .

[mike4287]

I checked into overclocking the bios when I booted up last and there is virtually nothing you can change with this computer. I also was wondering if the FSB should match the RAM speed, or like if you said if I did get a faster speed, would there be any slowdown since the frequencies do not match?

I was looking at newegg again and saw that a slightly faster version of the same memory is a few dollars cheaper right now so if the un-matching frequencies dont make a difference then I think I will go with that.

Other memory:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231116

[CWB]

as long as the ram speed is equal to/faster than the buss speed , you're good to go .
using ram that is way faster than the buss speed gains nothing .
it is akin to being able to only fill the bucket so fast .

[mike4287]

Thanks for the help CWB I got the RAM in the mail today and put it in. Booted up just fine and programs and everything seem to boot up significantly faster! So far I am thinking it was a good investment