Dell memory upgrade

implausible

Ok, so have my Dell Inspiron 1720 three years now. It's survived a wine spillage and I've gone through three chargers (there's a whole other thread there:mad:). The main problem with it is the speed - it takes forever to start up (even though I disabled a lot of the unnecessary automatic start-up stuff) and can barely cope with running more than 2 programs without freezing on me. I've run CC cleaner on it, defragmented it and am going to put all my music and pics on my external hard drive.

I can't justify forking out for a new laptop in the next year, so have been recommended to upgrade the memory. It only has 1 GB and is running Vista, so was thinking of upping that to 1.5 or 2 (I have enough slots) and installing Windows 7. Is this a good idea? Do I have to buy the memory from Dell or are there generic cards available? If so, how good are they?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Alanstrainor

Upgrade to 2Gb would be your best bet. Running vista on 1Gb is just never a good plan. Also i'd recommend you reinstall vista as it's probably got bog down over the years.
You can buy the memory anywhere really, so long as you go So-Dimm DDR2 memory you be fine.

implausible

Thanks for that, really needed reassurance before I went off and bought more memory. I really resent giving Dell any more money;)

Lu Tze

Crucial (i think) have a memory selector where you put in your make and model of laptop and it returns compatible ram for it. Might be helpful to you if you are unsure which to get

Alanstrainor

deemark wrote: »

Thanks for that, really needed reassurance before I went off and bought more memory. I really resent giving Dell any more money;)

Also, you should check what memory is in your current machine. Although you have 1Gb as it stands, you may need to buy two 1Gb sticks to upgrade it. As the 1Gb that's currently in it is probably split into two 512mb sticks.

As said, Crucial have a good calculator to tell you exactly what you need.

Dey were Sooted

yes the cruical scanner is very good
if you want to shop around for ram you can try

www.ebay.ie
www.mymemory.co.uk
www.dabs.ie
www.elara.ie

last time i looked to buy ram mymemory were the cheapest but they had no stock - oh and only go by the price after shipping is included .