New RAM in an old pooter

[caLLous]

Hi,

My mother has a Dell Dimension 4500 (it's desperately shit). It does what she wants (email, word processing, very basic web-browsing). But it only has 256mb of (DDR SDRAM) RAM so it does it all depressingly slowly.

The specs page above says it has 2 slots, each with a capacity of "128-, 256-, and 512-MB non-ECC DDR SDRAM". Max total capacity is 1gb. Does this mean I can't put ONE 1gb stick in one slot? And if I can, is this what I want?

 

[Ch3tan]

No it means you can put one 512mb stick in each slot, totalling 1gb.


Might be worth seeing if any Freddys have some kicking about that they don't need.

 

[caLLous]

It's that old that I was kinda hoping 1gb sticks weren't around when it was made and they just never got around to updating the specs page.

 

[nath]

RAM Memory Upgrade: Dell, Mac, Apple, HP, Compaq. USB drives, flash cards, SSD at Crucial.com - use the system scanner for memory funtime win super awesome!

 

[MYstIC G]

Computer memory upgrades for Dell Dimension 4500 Series Desktop/PC from Crucial.com

 

[MYstIC G]

You suck Nath.

 

[caLLous]

G wins but you're both quite legendary tbh.

Will this make a significant difference? It's a P4 2.4 (or 2.8, I forget which) but it's *so* slow. Sometimes when I minimise a full screen window, it's like a really bad Powerpoint slide transition, it redraws the desktop a line at a time. :\ I think this memory and a reinstall is called for.

 

[MYstIC G]

It should make a massive difference but I'd imagine the system will still hit the swapfile pretty hard.

 

[Zenith.UK]

Increasing your memory from 256MB to 2 sticks of 512MB should give you a substantial improvement in ordinary desktop performance. Apart from increasing your RAM by 4x, you might get additional benefit from interleaving from having 2 identical RAM sticks. It depends on the motherboard of the PC.

If your graphic card is built into the motherboard, make sure you give it a good chunk of memory in the BIOS settings afterwards.

I've got an old P4 2.4GHz and it came with 1GB RAM. I increased that to 2 sticks of 1GB (2GB total) and the improvement was instantly noticeable on Windows desktop. It meant that I could run multiple apps and move windows around without lagging behind.

 

[caLLous]

If I remember right it has a ATI Rage 128 in, it's definitely not onboard.

Have bought the RAM, thanks for the help!