Upgrade my RAM, yes or no?

I'm using an inspiron 1520, stats in sig, and I found a deal on 2 gig RAM sticks that would work with my notebook for $35(USD) each.

What I'm asking though, is how much of a difference would the extra RAM make? I'm using a 32bit Vista Premium OS so I know it won't recognize the full 4 gigs if I get 2 sticks, but it should easily make use of 3.5gigs worth of it at least. Is the jump from 2gigs to 4gigs a big difference or is 2gigs enough for multitasking and whatever games my 8600M GT can handle?

Would buying only one stick and getting 3gigs of RAM even work well since I would be using unmatched sticks?

 

First off, you wouldn't get 3.5gigs, you get probably ~3.2GB at most. Secondly, yes, you'll most likely see a noticeable gaming difference (depending on what games you play).

And yes, getting 3GB of RAM would work perfectly fine, mismatched sticks doesn't really matter with that chipset.

 

What do you mean by unmatched? The Size or Brand? I have a 1GB stick of G.SKILL and a 2GB stick of G.SKILL in my 1720. Going from 2GB to 3GB was a huge performance boost for me. Everything runs a LOT smoother, But 4GB.. I really don't know if there is a noticeable diffurance between 3GB and 4GB. Wouldn't hurt though, thats for sure.

 

I'm running XP and just upgraded from 1GB to 4GB on my vostro 1500..

When I right-click on my computer and go to properties, it tells me it sees 3.5 GB...very nice to see, since I was expecting it to say 3.2....

 

Depends.

Are you going to have multiple programs running in the background while playing, and want to switch between them without lag? Then you need more than 2 Gigs.

All you want to do is play games - no multitasking: Get the two gigs. Even the latest games like crysis run fine with 2 gigs.

No games? Keep 1 Gig

How much difference does it make?

Battlefield 2 at high settings:
1 Gig: Unplayable 0-7 fps
2 Gigs: 30-60 fps

Crysis at low/med:
1 Gig: Don't have the nerve to try
2 Gigs: 15-30 fps

MS Word 10 page document
1 Gig = 2 Gig = decent

MS Word 10,000 page document
errr, consider changing school/job?

 

What about the difference from 2GB to 3GB?

 

No offense, but have you really used Vista on 1GB of RAM? It's atrocious; the OS itself uses up 70% of your RAM to idle. You open Firefox and Word at the same time and bam! Welcome to paging land! It's definitely worth the money to go to 2GB as a minimum for Vista. It's almost totally unusable on 1GB of RAM. I'd frankly recommend a minimum of 3GB to do any serious gaming at all. Vista is the most RAM-hungry OS on the market, and since RAM is so cheap, feed it!

 

To be fair, with some decent optimization and tweaking Vista is fine on 1GB of RAM, just like XP was on 128mb of RAM. It's not optimal, but it's useable.

However, considering RAM is dirt cheap, I have to agree that there's no reason not to get 2GB or even 3GB.

 

I disagree. I tried vista ultimate with aero on on my 1g ram lappy and it was very smooth. I started much faster than xp. About 640 mb of ram were free(cached, but it doesn't matter), same as with xp.

1 gig is not that bad. I tried crysis on low-medium @ 848x480 and i got about 30 fps. more ram doesn't increase framerate by alot, it just reduces the stuttering that you might encounter.

 

I have problems with RAM sometimes with Vista, and I have 2 gb! 45% on idle most of the time is taken by vista .. O_O
Necromas where did you find the RAM for 35 $ ?

 

Went from 2GB or RAM to 3GB and upgraded from Windows Vista 32 to Windows Vista 64 Ultimate and I couldn't be happier. I'll try testing the performane difference from 2GB to 3GB on Battlefield 2, CoD4, and Crysis soon after my exams.

 

I already have 2gigs (listed in sig).

Link to the deal: http://bensbargains.net/deal/50001/0

If I get 2 sticks the price would be $90 I guess since the rebate is one per customer only.

 

I orginally had 1 Gig, and was actually was devating on NBR if I should go for an extra gig. Word + ie7 caused no problems, and I actually posted a picture with all the stuff I needed to open before I ran out of RAM - it was like 7 programs can't remember exactly which ones.

But then, I got BF2, and noticed a lot of lag, and HD activity while playing all maxed out. That's the only reason I got 2 Gigs.

The answer was on the first sentence of my post:

more than 2 Gigs = 3 Gigs
Other than that I don't think 3 Gigs will make a difference.

 

Yeah, having >2GB's will also allow your GPU to use it's hardware Turbocaching to it's fullest extent, which in some games will provide a noticeable performance increase.

 

I'm seeing 3.5 GB out of 4 GB.


And to the OP, yes, it is worth it.