Mmmm.... speed of my inspiron 1520

Ok, so to save money, I ordered my (stupid) inspiron 1520 with 1GB ram and then purchased 4GB from newegg. The first thing I noticed is that my laptop feels really really slow. Sometimes it will load for about a second when I do something like.... right click on the desktop. In general it's just really sluggish and I havent even been doing anything other than web browsing.


At first I just brushed it off and made it out to be the issue of only have 1 GB ram, and that everything would be better when my newegg ram arrived.

But then just now I used EVEREST to check out the specs of my desktop. I have had my desktop for 3 and a half years now (got it from ibuypower.com) and really the only thing wrong with it is overheating. It overheats in a flash from simple things like watching youtube videos if it isnt cold enough (it's winter now, but back in late summer/fall I couldnt even use it at all on hotter days).

But my point is that EVEREST seemed to show me that all I have in this computer is 2x 512MB sticks of ram. Does this sound right considering that I got it specifically for gaming (it wasnt all that cheap) that long ago?

The reason that I'm asking is that aside from the overheating issue, this computer (desktop) still works like a charm. It's speedy, it really doesnt ever seem to lag. Granted all that I'm doing is web browsing, watching videos, listening to music, etc, but I'm doing less than that on my inspiron and my inspiron is slower.


So.... what's the deal? What am I missing?

 

Is the 4GB in? Does the Dell come with Norton?

Otherwise, Vista is just slower with the same hardware and it takes time to tweak the system to be as fast as your desktop.

 

Does your computer use Vista, cause Vista is a monster ram-eater; and XP uses considerably less. It takes about 800MBs of ram, leaving you with only 200.

What's your processor? And if you have a large/speedy flash card/drive, try using Ready Boost.

 

If you didn't already, try removing bloatware too.

 

I removed PC-cillin but other than that I couldnt find much. I tried making a topic on the matter and people were just like "dont worry, Dell doesnt come with much bloatware, you'll be fine"

Also, no, I havent recieved the 4BG RAM in the mail yet, and yes my laptop uses Vista. The main reason was ram capacity, because I can upgrade to 64 bit when I start doing ram intensive stuff. Processor is.... Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz/800Mhz FSB/4MB cache)

So what is the ram capacity of XP? If Vista raises the cap but takes so much more.... what is the point?

 

1GB ram for Vista is definitely slow...add a 2GB SD card (or similar) as Readyboost and you'll see a big difference.

 

32bit Vista and XP both have the same memory limit: 4GB. You'll actually end up with less then 4GB when running though due to PCI memory mapping. It's usually 4GB - (size of video memory) - (misc devices, usually 32-128MB). Vista 64 and XP-64 both don't have this problem and support memory over 8GB. Vista 64 Home is 8GB, Vista 64 Premium is 16GB, and XP-64 is 128GB.

In the best cases you usually end up seeing around 3.7GB.

Vista is horrible about memory. I usually recommend people get 2GB minimum for Vista.

 

Hmm..... I am completely unaware as to why anyone would want Vista in that case. So that means that the problem will be solved when I do get the RAM from newegg, but right now I have Vista 32 home premium and wasnt planning on upgrading quite yet.

How do I come accross XP-64?

 

You can buy it just like normal copies of Windows, except I think they only sell the OEM version. Most online stores will sell it to you as long as you buy some piece of hardware as well. A power cord or something else cheap counts.

Newegg sells it, as well as a number of other retailers.

Be aware that not everything works quite as well on the 64bit versions of Windows, Vista included. Drivers are harder to find, and some older programs won't run at all. Wikipedia has a good entry on this here.

 

You can request 64 bit editions of Vista if you only have the 32 bit version from Microsoft at the Alternate Media request page.

You can also get a 120 day trial version of Windows XP x64 from Microsoft at their trial page.