Upgrading RAM in XPS1330

I have 2Gb of RAM in my M1330, but it's not enough any more. I do a lot of development work, and I'm fed up getting warnings from Windows.

I've never upgraded anything on a laptop before, so I don't really know what I'm doing. Can I just buy any notebook RAM (my current RAM is DDR667) and replace the stuff I've got? Am I right in thinking it's just under the hatch on the bottom? Do I need a matched pair or could I buy a 2GB stick and replace one of the 1Gb sticks I have now?

Any help is appreciated.

 

You can mix and match ram as long as the timings and mhz are the same, itd be best to buy a matched pair 4 GB kit, then windows would use as much ram as possible if you are running windows x86, or the full 4GB if your using x64

 

what warning is windows exactly telling you?
i havent seen windows saying that it has not enough memory...
arent you seeing errors about virtual memory? maybe its hard disk space or the setting of your vm is too low

 

I replaced my 2GB with a pair of Corsairs 2GB 667Mhz sticks making it a total of 4GB.
So far it's been running like a champ. Running multiple Virtual Machines sucks up a lot of memory.
The Windows warning about the system running low on Virtual Memory is bogus. It's a stupid attempt to get the user to allow Windows to handle it, which will result is additional hard drive activity.
With 4GB RAM, I've reduced my pagefile size to 128MB. That warning shows up occasionally but I've learned to ignore it. Nothing bad has happened yet.

 

Going to 4 GB of RAM on a 32-bit OS is useless. The OS will only see between 3 and 3.5 GB of that 4 GB. If you have a 64-bit OS, then you can use the full 4 GB.

The RAM you need to use is SODIMM DDR2 667 MHz or 800 MHz. It is normally located under a panel under the notebook. Once you have access to it, you can remove the RAM by undoing the clips on the sides, and pulling the module out. The reverse procedure can be used to install new modules.

 

Crucial memory works just fine. You can use 667 or 800 Mhz memory. Your system won't run at 800 Mhz with the later but sometimes the latency is decreased. I use 4 gig on all my laptops and I am able to utilize all of it. Although zero is right about the largest program only being able to utilize up to 2 gig its best to think of windows as a collection of programs so the more memory the quicker your system will respond. One caveot is that with 4 gig's of more of memory your hardrive will run longer at boot up as windows tries to fill up that excess memory by caching most frequently used programs and hibernation takes forever.

 

I bought two sticks of Crucial DDR2 with the same spec as the old RAM and switched to Vista x64. So far so good.

 

it's useless as you lose a few MB of the ram (anyways, you have more than 3GB) but going with 4GB is the only way to have dual channel, if you go for 3GB you lose it.

 

That's wrong!

Read intel chipset information regarding flex mode. Page 66 section 5.2.1.1:

Intel Flex Memory Technology (Dual Channel Interleaved Mode with Unequal Memory Population)
http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/datasheet/316273.pdf

Dell XPS M1530/M1330 do support that. Google for Flex Mode benchmarks. 3GB is a perfectly fine configuration!

 

It's so annoying to read this over and over again. It's just plain wrong.

Dell XPS M1330/1530 uses up to 3.5GB memory using 32-Bit XP/Vista (actually 4GB work as well using 32-Bit PAE mode, but that's another story).

Using 64-Bit OS eats up all the "advantage" of having up to 500MB more memory available. Check memory consumption:



In a 4GB configuration your 500MB advantage shrinks to 300MB upon booting Vista 64-Bit because of the bigger application footprint (64-Bit pointers) and some caches and alignment. The more 64-Bit applications you use, the worse it gets.

However you'll hardly find any 64-Bit application: GIMP, Photoshop CS3 (*), OpenOffice, MS Office all of them are only available in 32-Bit. Those run even slightly slower due to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64

Yeah, but my internet browser! Well, you'll install the 32-Bit Version anyway. Otherwise you won't have flash, youtube, ...
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=6b3af6c9

Your most demanding 64-Bit you'll be going to install is probably 64-Bit FFDShowTryout Filter.

The bottom line: 32-Bit and 64-Bit are equally fast and capable running a 4GB machine. Pick whatever you prefer. If you reach the memory limits in either one, the other OS wouldn't have done better.

If you really want 64-Bit, go Ubuntu 64-Bit. All user space applications are available (except Flash) in 64-Bit. In addition Calling-Conventions of the ABI are faster in 64-Bit. x264 is fastest on 64-Bit Linux.

Some people believe 64-bit floating point numbers are faster on 64-Bit. The truth is 64-bit floating point is calculated on SSE2 anyway. One command does two operations anyway in its 128Bit SSE2 register. That's way faster than FPU and any decent FPU demanding application has SSE2 optimization built in anyway.

(*) There are certain cases were Photoshop CS3 runs faster on 64-Bit. These cases are described in the online documentation of CS3.