Will upgrade to ram help latitude 420

I have a Latitude D 420 with 512 dedicated and 512 other ram memory. It is my light weight travel computer. It seems to run a little slow. Am thinking of upgrading the non dedicated ram memory to 1gb which seems fairly easy to do. Any body have thoughts about this. Does any one have a 420 with 1 gb and how does it perform. I run win xp and do not plan on upgrade to vista.

 

Depending on how much memory you use, it could be a great investment.

Use the task manager to see how much memory you are using.

Remember that the d420 uses a 1.8" HDD which may cause things to run a little slow.

You'll need PC 5400/5300 or PC 43/4200 memory--get whichever is cheaper, the performance difference is negligible.

 

Thank you. I had overlooked the hard drive speed part of the equation. I will need to factor that in.

 

The memory addition will help but not as much as you may expect. First try to maximize the performance by defragging you hard drive and removing unecessary programs and junk ie. old song you have stored on your HD that you no longer listen to. FYI did you know the hard disk is one of the slowest components in the computer in terms of speed and capacity / data acess rates. So improving the performance of it will greatly improve your pc. The memory should also match your FSB to get the maximum performance of your system components. Also go to control panel ==>system and check your virtual memory settings. Try to maximize them as this enabes windows to use the extra free space on your HD as memory which will help all of your programs and aps to load faster. You need any help or if this has helped give me a shout .