More RAM?

[eddie151]

hello all

i have a old celeron laptop. it runs windows 7 but is painfully slow, so i have installed a new faster (7200rpm) hard drive and i was going to increase the RAM from 1gb to 4gb. in task manager the memory usage always seems to be above 80%. would increaseing the RAM help speed up the laptop?

thank you in advance

eddie151

 

[legendkiller]

Yes it does by a bit and it increase performance much more faster if you got 1333MHz RAM... 1GB these days is useless because newer technology or software are released daily and is using more and more hardware like stuff...

 

[eddie151]

can you put any speed RAM into a laptop? i did a crucial scan and it said it supported 800MHz RAM. it already had 1gb 800MHz ram in it so i not speeding up the RAM just increasing its size.can i put faster RAM in it? it is ddr2 ram which is 200 pin i think. i thought 1333MHz was ddr3 which is 204 pin?

again thank you for your time

eddie

 

[beenthere]

No you must use the correct speed and spec RAM for your exact model laptop.

 

[tm_nv]

can you put any speed RAM into a laptop? i did a crucial scan and it said it supported 800MHz RAM. it already had 1gb 800MHz ram in it so i not speeding up the RAM just increasing its size.can i put faster RAM in it? it is ddr2 ram which is 200 pin i think. i thought 1333MHz was ddr3 which is 204 pin?

again thank you for your time

eddie

You are correct. DDR2 is 192 pin maxed out at 1066MHz if i Remeber. The 1333 MHZ is DDR3 and yes it is 204 pin. You will need to follow crucials advise and get 1 Gig of 800 MHz DDR2. Unless oyu only have 1 memory slot, in which case get a 2GB stick.

 

[eddie151]

thank you for your advice.

but will increasing the ram help speed up the laptop? it costs £30 for the upgrade and i am reluctant to do it if it dosnt make a noticeable increase.

thank you

 

[caqde]

Faster RAM only helps if the system is able to use that speed of memory and even then the max most people get out of faster memory is a 1-5% speed increase (usually on the lower 1% side) anyways in your case the 80% usage means you are using ALL of your RAM and a good portion of your Virtual Memory you will see a very large increase in speed from going to 4GB of memory.

 

[eddie151]

caqde thank you for your quick response. you are a gentleman and a scholar.

many regards

 

[tm_nv]

thank you for your advice.

but will increasing the ram help speed up the laptop? it costs £30 for the upgrade and i am reluctant to do it if it dosnt make a noticeable increase.

thank you

Yes adding more memmory will speed up your laptop in this case. This is because Windows 7 requires at least 2 GB of ram to run properly, 4 if you want performance. Note that adding more memmory will only get you so far, for instance if you have 6, then decide to bump it to 8 you will not see a significant perfomance increase, unless you do a allot 3D of modeling or rendering, which since this is a laptop would be a joke to say the least.

 

[geofelt]

In a pc with insufficient ram, the os has to continually swap code in and out to the hard drive, making things painfully slow. It gets worse as you do more multitasking.
So yes, added ram will definitely help performance by reducing the amount of demand paging. 2gb should be a minimum and 4gb is better. Ram is cheap, so get 4gb.

Check the ram vendor's configurator and enter your pc model. It will tell you what your upgrade options are and which ram kits are compatible. Try kingston first.

Some laptops have the first stick installed as non removable, so you would be limited in what you could do.

By and large, the amount of ram is much more important than the speed of the ram. Different speed ram will affect real app performance in the low single digits percentage wise.