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Lewis Ehrhardt
06-23-2014, 3:22 PM
I have an older hp laptop with 3.0 gb of ram. I can upgrade to 4gb for $71.00. Would I benefit in speed gain by this upgrade enough to justify it? I do mostly word processing and internet surfing? Thanks Lewis

Brian Elfert
06-23-2014, 3:35 PM
I don't think I would spend that kind of money for just one additional GB of RAM. If you are running a 32 bit OS you can't use the whole 4GB anyhow. You need a 64 bit OS to take advantage of 4GB or more. I paid just $35 to go all the way to 8GB in my laptop a few years ago. Save the $71 for a new computer.

Ole Anderson
06-23-2014, 5:08 PM
I agree with Brian. I just priced adding 2 GB for a 7 year old church computer to use it for recording and streaming video and it was $47. Adding a current OS (on XP now) I was looking at putting $180 into a machine (it is a desktop though) that is close to being outdated so I will look at building a new one for just a few hundred more.

David Masters
06-23-2014, 5:41 PM
You would see no advantage in performance of the OS and applications (as defined by you) by adding the additional 1 GB of memory. I agree with the others that the money spent on a memory upgrade would be better applied elsewhere.

Dave

Brett Luna
06-23-2014, 6:15 PM
Doubling RAM might make a significant (but by no means miraculous) improvement in performance as long as your OS and applications support it. One gig...not so much...and probably not at all in the word processing and internet surfing activities you mentioned. Do you regularly run maintenance software? A cluttered registry and bloated temp folders can really bog a system down, especially if you're running close to capacity. After that, if you're not ready to buy a new laptop, you might consider upgrading to a solid state drive if you don't already have one. It can dramatically reduce boot time and file operations. It will cost you more than $71 of course.

Rich Engelhardt
06-24-2014, 5:39 AM
I have an older hp laptop with 3.0 gb of ram. I can upgrade to 4gb for $71.00.Older being the operative word.....

You could stick $71.00 worth of RAM in the thing only to have it die next week.

A new Dell laptop w/4 GB of RAM is only ~ $400.00

Curt Harms
06-24-2014, 7:57 AM
Doubling RAM might make a significant (but by no means miraculous) improvement in performance as long as your OS and applications support it. One gig...not so much...and probably not at all in the word processing and internet surfing activities you mentioned. Do you regularly run maintenance software? A cluttered registry and bloated temp folders can really bog a system down, especially if you're running close to capacity. After that, if you're not ready to buy a new laptop, you might consider upgrading to a solid state drive if you don't already have one. It can dramatically reduce boot time and file operations. It will cost you more than $71 of course.

That would be my vote as well. A rule of thumb that seems about right to me is to double Microsoft's minimum. For example, Win 7 & 8 32 bit minimum recommend RAM is 1 GB. so 2 GB. for 'mainstream' uses such as yours. Win 7 & 8 64 bit minimum is 2 GB. so 4 GB. in that case. Of course in some cases - maybe video editing or large databases - more is better. If your Windows install is over a couple years old, you might be surprised at what a back up your data, wipe and reinstall might accomplish. Some refer to it as Windows rot. SSD prices are coming down and could be transferred to a new machine or used in an external enclosure so that might be something to consider.

Mike Olson
06-24-2014, 9:52 AM
Depends on your laptop.
Some laptop Video cards share system RAM and depending on your system it may allow you to adjust that in the BIOS.
I'd say try and find the manual and see if you can increase the amount of RAM dedicated to your video card. Increasing that can speed up processing video and flash for Web surfing.

Lewis Ehrhardt
06-25-2014, 9:16 AM
Thanks for the guidance. New computer it is. Lewis