Anybody have suggestions on A: good brand of laptop memory B: where to get it cheap C: how to install laptop memory I've installed memory into pc's dozens of times but never opened a laptop before thanks
I have a lot of laptop memories, unfortunately as my father always said, "When your done with your tools put a shed over it!"
Corsair, Patriot, and OCZ are good brands I have personal experience with in the past. I personally am a big Corsair fan and they have amazing warranties. Newegg.com is my favorite retailer but Tigerdirect.com also has fair RAM prices. Good luck. Go ahead and throw an SSD into that thing as well. Breath some new life.
I did that last week when I had to rebuild my work laptop last week and it has made it smoking fast for boot up and shut down. for the most part I haven't noticed an increase in performance across the rest of my programs as I'm usually running them across our network, using server resources instead of my laptop's resources. As for memory I've used Patriot, Corsair, Crucial, and Kingston in the past and would recommend any of those. As for buying, I'd probably drop by the TigerDirect store in Raleigh and buy it there in person.
I found out a long time ago that the actual memory chipsets are produced by only three companies and they are all practically identical in architecture. The memory board and it's circuits are the only deviating factor. And even then, they have to stay within industry standards to remain compatible with standard system operations. Find the complete statistics on the ram your machine requires from the laptop manufacturers web site. Check what your "max" ram capacity is also. Apply that requirement and go for the cheapest. All the bell and whistle hoopla in high priced ram is inconsequential to the average users requirements. There's a door on the bottom of the laptop for ram. Usually just two screws. It has a symbol pressed into the plastic next to the door that looks like a ram chip. See what you have, and what size configuration is in there before buying any new ram. Your best bet is to take that ram and your laptop model # with you when going to buy more.
Two things I have found that substantially speed up your PC or laptop and neither are free, and one that will speed up the system if yours is overly congested. First is what's being discussed. . .an increase in memory. Generally older laptops come from the manufacturer with a pitiful allocation. Pretty much little more than to run the operating system. So doubling the memory will show a refreshing jump in performance. Second is an SSD drive or solid state drive. If you purchase an SSD the same size as your existing HD, ...anyone.. can transfer the entire contents of the old platter hard disc over to the new SSD with little effort and minimal technical skill. SSDs price points used to be prohibitive for the average user. Recently however smaller SSDs are very reasonable and will provide a substantial increase in performance. For older laptops with "average" space, say. . .60-120gb, you can replace them for ~$100. Most laptops have a second HD bay, and the old HD can be put there for additional data storage. For example, where it might take 100-160 seconds for your laptop to be at the desktop and be usable, an SSD would reduce that time easily by half or more. My laptop is usable after 25-30 seconds after hitting the power button. Large programs like AutoCad that might take 30 seconds on a platter HD, are usable in 5-8 seconds on an SSD, etc. Third is a free program called CCleaner. It can remove, with some margin of safety, the congestion of useless data that has accumulated in your registry and DLL libraries. Whenever you run a program and/or boot your system, the CPU must scan large swaths of dead-end data and thus be slightly or substantially slowed, depending on the amount your system has accumulated over time.
The laptop is a dell inspiron 9100. I bought it back in 2005. I hardly ever used it. Started using it in 2010 for my A&P class. It came pre loaded with windows xp and one gig of ram. I was able to upgrade it in 2011 to windows 7 pro, with software from school. I really still didn't use it much till the power supply went out on my desktop. It seams to run very slow. Like an old windows 95 with a 2400 baud modem slow. It takes 10-15 minutes to run anything. I use Mozilla and it maxes out the memory.
1gb of memory is way too little to run Win 7. You'll be amazed if you doubled it. But if you can afford it, go with 2 sticks of 2gb. I'm pretty sure it has at least to slots.
I would love to go to 4gb but according to Dell's webpage the laptop can only handle 2gb of memory. Also why is mozilla using so much of the memory? over 75% even with add ons disabled
Hmm, ok. But DELL might be saying that because of the operating system that was installed. You might want to verify. XP 32bit is limited to 3gb, just FYI. Either case, you'll see a decent boost by going to 2gb.
This may sound like a silly question but how could I verify that the laptop could handle the 4gb without having to physically buying and installing the 4gb only to see if it would work or not work?. I wonder if I took it over to Compusa and see if they have any open packages of laptop memory and see if it could support it.
I was looking at the specs on your laptop. I would suggest just going to 2gb anyway. You have rather old memory and low pin count. Older memory tends to be overly expensive if purchased new. You essentially would be buying expensive running shoes for grandma to walk to the mailbox.
