Computer techs out there? ram question...

[fourthmeal]

I'm upgrading the RAM in my desktop. It has four card slots. Right now, it has two 512 cards in it. Can I leave those in and put two more 1gb cards in the other two slots if they're the same speed? Or should I just pull the two 512s and put in the two 1 gbs?

 

[fourthmeal]

By the way, this does belong in General Snowmobiling because I'm working on the damn computer instead of my sled because there's no snow to go out and break stuff.

 

[Blk88GT]

I typically try to put the largest sticks in the first slots. Use as many as you have, it only gets better. You might have to play with the order of them depending on the hardware.

 

[catmandude]

Yes

Yes, put the 2 1GB sticks in along with the existing RAM. It will work fine as long as your computer's memory is 2100mHz or faster.

Dave

 

[fourthmeal]

Beauty. Thanks guys.

 

[polarisrunner]

This may be a stupid question but what benefit does this have to a lap top? I am by no means computer savy, but willing to learn more "reason for the question I suppose"

 

[Eliminator351]

This may be a stupid question but what benefit does this have to a lap top? I am by no means computer savy, but willing to learn more "reason for the question I suppose"

Most computers will benefit from more ram unless it is already maxed out. It will really speed up your system especially if you run multiple processes at the same time. If you are running less than 1GB of ram I would highly recommend upgrading. Most XP computers have a sweet spot of about 2GB of ram total. Any more than that and you usually have a diminishing return on your money for an xp system. The system will still benefit from more ram but you don't want to go over 4GB on an xp system, it wont even recognize the full 4gb. Vista the minimum I would recommend is 2GB and 4GB would be great in most cases. Load it up, you wont regret it.

If your computer does not have enough ram to run all the applications you have open it will use your hard drive as ram and it is extremely slow compared to actual ram. If you hear your hard drive thrashing a lot this is why.

 

[shortstop20]

You need to check and see how much RAM your motherboard supports. Installing two 1 GB sticks and your two 512 MB sticks is pointless if the motherboard only supports 2 GB Maximum. If that was the case you would be best off buying two more 512 MB sticks. XP will supports up to 4 GB(not all usable) but if the motherboard doesn't recognize that much RAM neither will XP.

 

[fourthmeal]

Put it all in there and the computer sees it all. Says I have 2.9 GB of ram now, sweet. Now I can run CS3, if i can figure out how to use it..

 

[phatty]

This may be a stupid question but what benefit does this have to a lap top? I am by no means computer savy, but willing to learn more "reason for the question I suppose"

in layman terms think of RAM as a place to store food at your house. You have a lot of food to store, but only so much space. So you store some at your neighbors house. While you can imagine how much time it takes to go get food everytime you need it from your neighbors. By adding more space you can store more food close for quicker access. You can make a meal faster than if you had to go next door to get some sugar...

Windows works the same way, the program needs all sorts of information to operate effeciently. When you have the max amount of storage space, it can place all these files into memory and retrieve them quickly. If not, then it stores them on hard disk and has to take time to search down into the hard drive, read it out, write it on the bus and ship it to the CPU for processing. But as stated your motherboard and operating system dictate how much RAM you can use. Hope that helps!

 

[ruffryder]

phatty,

never heard a food vs ram analogy... was quite good!

 

[Snoman69]

phatty,

never heard a food vs ram analogy... was quite good!

I'm hungry