Improve my RAM please?

beanok77

how do i do this? Using a celeron chip and only have 1gb of ram. laptop driving me nuts

PogMoThoin

beanok77 wrote: »

how do i do this? Using a celeron chip and only have 1gb of ram. laptop driving me nuts

What model is your laptop?

beanok77

PogMoThoin wrote: »

What model is your laptop?

HP530

Kantes

Get yourself a stick of this - http://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?productcode=ECE1019437

Do you know how to add ram yourself?

Handy little guide here if you need it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqJhaYgGP3Y

beanok77

Kantes wrote: »

Get yourself a stick of this - http://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?productcode=ECE1019437

Do you know how to add ram yourself?

Handy little guide here if you need it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqJhaYgGP3Y

Hey Kantes, thanks for the reply. No I don't know how to add it myself but I looked it up on youtube and it doesn't look too difficult. Is it worth adding ram to a celeron processor or should I just bite the bullet and buy a new laptop?

jnaseer

Hi beanok77,
What kind of symptoms are you experiencing that makes you unhappy with the laptop? RAM may not be the issue.

It is cheap and easy to install RAM if you can provide the laptop name and model number but again it may not solve your issue.

Johan.

beanok77

jnaseer wrote: »

Hi beanok77,
What kind of symptoms are you experiencing that makes you unhappy with the laptop? RAM may not be the issue.

It is cheap and easy to install RAM if you can provide the laptop name and model number but again it may not solve your issue.

Johan.

Hi Johan,

It's just slow in general, flash player very slow on some sites. I've uninstalled it and reinstalled and still the same.

I've uninstalled all unecessary programmes, did a disc clean up and ran a defrag. I can't remember the amount of space free on the hard drive but there is nothing on the laptop. I'd say there is 60 to 80gb free and its only 120gb in size.

No pics or vids. No itunes. I want to install itunes but am afraid because it will even get slower with the 8 gb on my ipod.

I use avg free as my virus protection, ran scans and no virus also ran scans using microsoft malicious and nothing came up.

It was my sister's laptop and she gave it to me. There was alot of poker applications installed on it but I removed them all. They took up a couple of hundred mb.

I am now convinced it has to be ram but any other advice or opinions greatly appreicated.

It is a HP530, and I will post the model number later.

Thanks

Kantes

beanok77 wrote: »

jnaseer wrote: »

Hi beanok77,
What kind of symptoms are you experiencing that makes you unhappy with the laptop? RAM may not be the issue.

It is cheap and easy to install RAM if you can provide the laptop name and model number but again it may not solve your issue.

Johan.

Hi Johan,

It's just slow in general, flash player very slow on some sites. I've uninstalled it and reinstalled and still the same.

I've uninstalled all unecessary programmes, did a disc clean up and ran a defrag. I can't remember the amount of space free on the hard drive but there is nothing on the laptop. I'd say there is 60 to 80gb free and its only 120gb in size.

No pics or vids. No itunes. I want to install itunes but am afraid because it will even get slower with the 8 gb on my ipod.

I use avg free as my virus protection, ran scans and no virus also ran scans using microsoft malicious and nothing came up.

It was my sister's laptop and she gave it to me. There was alot of poker applications installed on it but I removed them all. They took up a couple of hundred mb.

I am now convinced it has to be ram but any other advice or opinions greatly appreicated.

It is a HP530, and I will post the model number later.

Thanks

Give Ccleaner a download too. I always find it adds a bit of speed after I run it through my registry even if all I'm finding are invalid shortcuts etc. Maybe a defrag aswell if you haven't already done one.

When you say you're using avg and a Microsoft program to run scans are these installed simultaneously? Having two separate virus scanners on your computer can clash and cause problems even slowing down your computer like you say is happening.

It may just be that the ram isn't hacking it for the moment or else your hardware in general is a bit outdated. To be honest I'd try the ram first, it's cheap and can often make a vast improvement. It would also save a lot of money if it ended up solving the speed issue and save another poor laptop from the bin before it's time

beanok77

Kantes wrote: »

Give Ccleaner a download too. I always find it adds a bit of speed after I run it through my registry even if all I'm finding are invalid shortcuts etc. Maybe a defrag aswell if you haven't already done one.

When you say you're using avg and a Microsoft program to run scans are these installed simultaneously? Having two separate virus scanners on your computer can clash and cause problems even slowing down your computer like you say is happening.

It may just be that the ram isn't hacking it for the moment or else your hardware in general is a bit outdated. To be honest I'd try the ram first, it's cheap and can often make a vast improvement. It would also save a lot of money if it ended up solving the speed issue and save another poor laptop from the bin before it's time

Yeah running the 2 programmes together but they are probably the only 2 apps installed on the laptop all the rest are necessary.

Yeah I think it has to ram, just have to find the right part. laptop is probably 4 years onld but never really been used.

I ran a defrag a couple of times. might try Ccleaner when I get home.

Kantes

Try uninstalling one of the AV programs anyway. AVG Free should do the job for you or else just go for MS Security Essentials.

HTB

Came across a problem similar to this recently.

It turned out that the hard drive was starting to go. The system would run fine for a few minutes and then slow down and take ages to do anything. Ran a disk checker on the drive and loads of bad sectors.

Put another drive in and the laptop flew.

Just a thought.

beanok77

HTB wrote: »

Came across a problem similar to this recently.

It turned out that the hard drive was starting to go. The system would run fine for a few minutes and then slow down and take ages to do anything. Ran a disk checker on the drive and loads of bad sectors.

Put another drive in and the laptop flew.

Just a thought.

Thanks, hope its not that, will try the ram first as probably less expensive.

jnaseer

HTB wrote: »

Came across a problem similar to this recently.

It turned out that the hard drive was starting to go. The system would run fine for a few minutes and then slow down and take ages to do anything. Ran a disk checker on the drive and loads of bad sectors.

Put another drive in and the laptop flew.

Just a thought.

Just pointed another persons thread in this direction. They were experiencing similar problems to you. I think if your running the OS that originally came with the laptop then it most likely has sufficient ram.

Adding more RAM may improve the issue but the real problem will not be resolved. Windows uses a paging file when managing memory and this is used even when the system has free physical RAM available! This paging file is cached on the hard disk, and is pulled from there into memory as required. To monitor your disk read writes you can get applications from microsoft. They go under the name sysinternals.

Mechanical hard disks have slow read and write speeds and are usually the bottleneck on computers and laptops - SSD drives should replace them but they are not mainstream yet. You will hear the hard disk chugging along alot when waiting for something to load. If other apps are fighting for the disk it slows everything down.

yoyo

beanok77 wrote: »

Thanks, hope its not that, will try the ram first as probably less expensive.

More memory would help, so would a backup and complete restore of Windows. As said if the hard drive has loads of bad sectors it will be slowing to a hault until it suddenly dies completely. No harm running a hard drive diagnostic, look at seatools for dos which is a very good one you can burn onto a blank cd and run

Nick

beanok77

yoyo wrote: »

More memory would help, so would a backup and complete restore of Windows. As said if the hard drive has loads of bad sectors it will be slowing to a hault until it suddenly dies completely. No harm running a hard drive diagnostic, look at seatools for dos which is a very good one you can burn onto a blank cd and run

Nick

Thanks for the advice, the hard drive seems to be going fine though. Will do a diagnostic tonight though just to be safe.