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upgrading RAM from 512mb to 1gb.. worth it?

Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2007 8:51 pm
by SlaveToSilence
i have a toshiba satellite pro L20 1.4ghz laptop with two x 256mb DDR2 4200 (512mb) and was wondering if it would be worth selling the two 256mb sticks and getting two 512mb sticks instead?

would the performance difference be noticable? worth the money/hassle? if so in what area? it will be used for internet explorer and msn and playing music and avi/mpeg movies mostly, rarely games.. (i have the system in my signature for games ;)) where would the RAM help?

would it help when i have more internet explorer windows? i rarely have less than 10 open, and always have music or a film playing

it will be downloading 24/7 also (aswell as when in use) would the extra ram help there? even if just in how long it can stay on before it needs restarting? are laptops good to be just left to go for weeks without being touched? i will take off the casing and put a 120mm fan over it to keep it cool :)

at the moment i cant even play Halo without a bit of stuttering, would the extra 512mb help here? im told the graphics card was upgraded to a better ati card (not sure what/which tho)

would my laptop support / can you get anything faster than 4200? is there just one type of ddr2 laptop memory and any one of them will fit? (as long as its the right speed and the laptop supports it)

sorry, am new to laptops!



Thanks :)

Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2007 9:18 pm
by laguz1
512mb to 1024mb makes a noticeable difference, but not a tremendous one...

i upgraded my desktop from 512 to 1024, and everything runs a bit faster...i'm guessing a laptop would experience similiar effects...

when using IE, the ram wouldn't help significantly, but if you're also playing music, videos, and/or downloading, then the 1024 mb will show better performance...

ram will always help games a lot, esp. Halo, but the gpu and processor are equally important here...

if you are into photoshop, movie editing, and gaming, then a gpu might be considered, otherwise, you can ignore this, since its a lot harder to install

for memory, my old inspiron used SoDIMMs, which were short, fatter memory sticks...i think you use the ddr2 that matches whatever speed you have now? a faster memory will support lower speeds, but slower memory sticks may support higher speeds, but technically, its not registered at that speed...i don't think its a big issue though

downloading is mostly affected by your internet connection i think, since my laptop can match my faster desktop in speed when it comes to downloading on my dsl connection...

from my experience, i have a dell inspiron 2002 which has 2.4 ghz celeron, 512 mb memory, 40 gb HD, integrated graphics, and a dvdrom/cd-rw drive...All i do on that laptop is use IE7, Windows Media Player 10 for music/video, Word, PowerPoint, and occasionally, photoshop 7.0... Everything runs great, i can run WMP w/ word, powerpoint, IE7, etc, but if i do that for awhile, my laptop gets pretty toasty, and that fan is loud. Age of Empires II runs smoothly for an hour or so, before it lags due to cpu temps.

Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2007 9:43 pm
by SlaveToSilence
i think i'm SoDIMM when it comes to laptops :p

Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2007 10:14 pm
by Das_Saunamies
Should improve boot times if you've got a heavy anti-virus suite. Internet surfing, IM and media playback won't benefit much if at all. Heavy games would benefit, but your Celeron is just gonna kill whatever advantage you would get, and your Radeon 200M will take a bite out of the RAM and still suck at performance. Whatever you can play with that CPU and GPU you can play with 512 RAM, although it will benefit from more. Downloads will only benefit if you tweak the application to minimize disk use and load into memory instead(µTorrent is good with this), and even then it's just to benefit the HDD and not performance.

A laptop should be just fine even in prolonged use, although that's not what they're designed for. Just configure it properly and keep it cool.

I'd think it's worth it if you can get the upgrade cheap, but otherwise don't bother. It would boost performance(duh) but the laptop is otherwise pretty dismal.

Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2007 10:20 pm
by qviri
I have not been able to get a solid answer from the internets. If you are positively sure that your laptop uses DDR2, and not DDR (physically checking the RAM will do), upgrade, as DDR2 prices are ridiculously low. If it uses DDR, it would cost you about $60-80 to upgrade to 1 GB, and I don't think it would make big enough of a difference for just internet and movies on a secondary system. Just keep the operating system well trimmed and it'll be just fine.

Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2007 11:52 pm
by mcoleg
qviri said it...

in the end it all depends on what you plan to do with it and what you ran on it.

Posted: Sun Aug 19, 2007 12:52 am
by SlaveToSilence
i checked the prices for 1gb (2 x 512mb) 4200 DDR2 and it looks like i'll get it for less than a tenner including P&P :o so i'll do that and see what happens :)
im sure it will be fine for internet etc, im using it right now and it only took a couple minutes to start up with zone alarm and msn etc and its silent and running fanless, only noise is the hard-drive which im sure i wouldnt hear once i was in bed