memory upgrade question

Hi all,

I have a 2.5 year old E1705 notebook. I'm going to upgrade to W7 soon and in the process I thought I'd upgrade my memory from 2GB to 4GB. I ran Dell's utility from their tech support page and it seems to be the case that the maximum my computer will support is 2GB! Is that possible?

In any case, I ran a diagnostic program (from Dell's utility) and it says my computer has two memory slots, and currently each slot on my computer has "Dual In-line Memory Module 1GB, 533, 128X64, 8K, 200", whatever that means. I assume the 533 is memory speed (Hz) value. So according to Dell's utility, I am unable to increase the amount of RAM, but I could, for instance, "upgrade" to better chips (i.e., Dell sells DDR2 SDRAM Memory Speed: 800 MHz). Price would be $56. Would this be worth it at all?

Thanks for the advice.

 

Things are a little bit blurry with the E1505/E1705 memory situation. Officially (according to Dell), the machines only take up to 2GB. Officially (according to Intel), the 945 chipset takes up to 4GB. Most people seem to be able to get 3GB to work reliably, but 4GB seems to be a crapshot depending on... well I don't know what.

If your machine somehow really doesn't take more than 2GB, it is NOT worthwhile to get higher-clocked memory. It won't run faster than 533MHz (because that's all the 945 supports), and even if it did, you would not notice an appreciable improvement in performance.

 

Thanks for the useful information - I appreciate it!