Adding RAM always a good idea?

Does adding RAM to an old computer always help?

I currently own a 4-year-old Dell Inspiron 1501, which has 1 GB of RAM and a AMD Turion TL-50 (1.6 Ghz) processor. I was thinking about upgrading to a new laptop, but learned on this forum that I wouldn't be able to get a decent screen within my current budget of $700, so I'm thinking of inexpensive, ways to get a little more mileage out of this machine. It has issues running Office 2010 sometimes and multiple programs at the same time. Would upgrading the RAM to 2GB or even 4GB make any sense or is my slow processor the bottleneck?

 

It's going to be the CPU that's the limit here; you could add more RAM, but it's only going to do but so much.

 

1gb of ram is definitely a little tight. especially if you're running windows 7, i definitely recommend a minimum of 2gb.

having many tabs open in chrome, msn, skype and office open, my laptop uses about 3.5gb of ram.

 

I'm running XP on this machine. Office 2010 makes it nervous; I don't do any hard-core gming or use any heavy software, but I do run a bunch of tab in FF, have Outlook, IM, and Word running at the same time. Then, when my antivirus kicks in, it starts to hyperventilate.

Should I go to 2GB or to 4?

 

your laptop should have 2 slots for ram

take out the existing sticks of ram, buy a 2gb stick. check your ram usage in the performance monitor/task manager. (you can ebay the old ram)

if you are frequently getting up to 70+ % ram usage, get another 2gb stick. thats my advice.

 

+1, more RAM will most definitely help your performance. Your CPU is slow by today's standards but should be competent for what you want to do.

You're right, $700 will not buy a decent screen - not today, not a year from now, and not two years from now. So you'll have to save up more than that.

 

the inspiron 1501 dosent exactly have a stunning screen. you can pick up a wuxga latitude E6500 in the outlet for about 700. saw one the other day. might be worth checking the dell outlet or lenovo outlet for something in your budget

 

I upgraded the screen myself after purchasing, but the screen it came with is better than the 720p LED's I'm seeing in stores now.

I've been keeping an eye on the outlet, but purchasing from there makes me a little nervous. I can't afford to replace the laptop if it dies prematurely. I could get an XPS for $800, but that's a lot of money to me for a computer, especially since this Inspiron was $550. ($650 if you count the screen.) Honestly, the $700 was stretching it a little.

I think I'll take afhstingray's advice for now, which will buy me some time to think about saving for a new machine.

 

the outlet business machines come with a 3 year warranty, same as new ones. you can extend it to 5 if you wish.

as long as you dont buy "scratch and dent" the laptop will be as a new one

but having said that, if the CPU is keeping up with what you want to do, you'll be alright with your current laptop (might have to replace hard drive or optical drive, they tend to die after about 3-4 years) keep an eye on resource monitor, if your cpu usage is 90% most of the time chances are its a bottleneck for you.

 

Screen quality has gotten noticeably worse since the switch to LEDs from CCFLs. Washed out colors, mostly, and LEDs did not help backlighting evenness one bit. This is evident on commodity mainstream notebooks (aka everything in Best Buy).

A WUXGA Latitude from the Dell Outlet isn't a bad idea at all. Just make sure it comes with the three-year warranty.

 

Dell outlet is nice. You can return/exchange the notebook within 30 days until you're completely satisfied. It took me three laptops before the last one I got was essentially new. Home section offers default one year warranty, business section I think offers longer warranties.

 

and based on your usage, i think you'll benefit from getting a business grade notebook. you pay a bit more for the same specs as a consumer one, but they're rock solid. since you dont need super high performance, the longevity and ease of maintainence of a business grade notebook will fit your needs well.

 

2GB is fine, but check if your BIOS/chipset will support 4GB of RAM. I have a 2007 MY Lenovo T60 that's chipset limited to 3GB of RAM.

 

Chipset with Turion cpu from that era should work just fine with 4GB. 64bit OS is needed to fully benefit from that upgrade but having something like 3.5GB available ram is pretty good upgrade from 1GB.

 

CPU generally doesn't go over 70% unless I'm also playing a game or am just starting up programs. Available memory often drops below 50k, though.

For $25, I'll up the RAM to 2.5 (I have 2x 512 now) and keep an eye on the outlet in the meantime for a latitude or something in the meantime. Thanks for the input guys!

@HTWingNut: I thought Dell charged a 15% restocking fee to send a laptop back? And what was wrong with the first two machines you got?

 

That's patently false, espec compared to what you have now....

If you're in the US, look at local sales on this web site:

Compare prices for retail store sales at SalesCircular

 

This thread may add some more detailed insight
Inspiron 1501 memory limits - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

 

Thanks.

I also checked out the Dell smb Outlet, but it seems the business section also only offers the 3-year warranty as a $219-buy-up. The standard is the 1-year mail-in variety. On the plus side, I can get either a Latitude E5520 or an XPS 15, more or less similarly spec'd (i5, 4GB RAM, 7200 rpm hdd, , for $610-$650 with the coupon (excluding tax)...

 

Buying and adding the RAM yourself should be rather cheap.

Adding more RAM is never a BAD idea, but it does not mean you will see any real gains from it I.E. a GOOD idea.

1GB is normal for that generation, assuming your running XP and what not. But adding 1GB for 2GB total may help round out and speed up the system.

Also with an older system like that a cheap SSD may help make things feel and run much faster as well, and when its time to retire the system you can just pull it out and put it in the new system so its not like your donating money to a lost cause like you would in theory be doing with RAM as the RAM you get would not be compatible with any newer generation machines (also pretty much any new machine these days is already coming stock with a good amount of RAM)

 

i would avoid the 5xxx latitudes. i'd rather get a previous generation 6xxx instead as they are more durable and lighter

 

beside the fact that adding more RAM is good, you will see a good return if you're considering selling this laptop and buying a new one.

Unless you do photo editing, 2GB is more than enough for WinXP .

If you're keeping this laptop, you should also consider upgrading the CPU to an AMD Turion X2 TL60. They are very cheap in ebay

 

Is upgrading the CPU easy? And I am right in seeing that a TL-60 on ebay is $10-15?! Good idea, naton. Maybe I'll do CPU + 2GB ram, instead of 4gb ram.

An SSD seems like a pricier upgrade; I've got a 80GB HDD now which is sufficient but just barely. I've got an external drive, but I don't want to have to depend on that completely. An 80GB SSD on Newegg is $150, which is too much to put into this machine, I think, and not enough to last me through the full life cycle of a new laptop.

So no latitude 5xxx, but preference for the 6-series? How's the kewboard and tochpad on those? And what about these XPS's? I've read they have USB port issues. :S

 

with a dell it is very easy to replace the CPU. just download the dell service manual which will have complete instructions step by step on how to disassemble and replace. for 10-15 bucks its a good and cheap upgrade for you. in fact, with a 2ghz dual core processor, you can even stick windows 7 on it. which i suggest you do, to take advantage of 64 bit then you can use up to 4gb of ram in future if you wish to buy another 2gb stick

the latitude E6x10 and E6x00 series were fantastic machines. lovely keyboards. If you dont mind the 16:9 screens the E6x10 series is good.

 

The price for the AMD processor is correct. You might even find it for less if you take your time.

AMD CPUs are cheap because the demand for them is not high. I wont recommend buying an SSD drive because they are not good value for money. They are too expensive. It is worth buying one only for those who do video editing in a regular basis. Besides current SATA drivers are very fast. You will notice a real boost in speed (i.e. Windows Boot time, and programs loading time) if you buy a new harddrive.

I had a latitude E6400 for a short while, and the keyboard and the touchpad are a joy. The screen too. The E6410 and the current E6420 according to the reviews have the same keyboard as the E6400 (so it's the same quality).

There are various version for both the E6400, E6410, and E6420, some with the integrated intel card and some with dedicated ATI or nVidia graphics cards. If you intend to use the laptop for gaming opt for one with the nVidia or AMD/ATI GPU.

I bought my E6400 from ebay for £310 (about $450). It was one year old with the following configuration: Core 2 Duo T9900, 4GB RAM, 250 GB 7200 RPM HDD.
This should help you decide if you're getting a good deal buying it from Dell's outlet. If you consider buying from ebay just check that the person selling it to you is the original owner of the laptop. The latitude E64*0 series is sold with a 3 years warranty (at least in the UK). If you buy from the original owner you can transfer the ownership to yourself and thus benefit from the warranty

Edit:
XPS use to be Dell's brand for gaming laptops. If I'm not wrong, after buying Alienware, Dell delegated the XPS series to a multimedia series. They can be used for gaming but they are not as powerful as Alienware.

 

i fail to see how a ssd would help video editing, maybe compressing files?

but in regular usage you see a huge performance improvement. everything is so much snappier and windows boots/shuts down/hibernates so fast.

just no comparison to a normal HDD>

 

How many programs do you open when using Office 2010? I'm surprised it slows down so much especially if all you're trying to do is create a new doc, spread, or presentation. Now a fully animated presentation with images and videos, that I understand could slow it down.

Maybe you should look into some basic maintenance stuff like defragmenting, checking for bad sectors, registry cleaning, temp file deleting etc.

 

i wouldn't consider upgrading to ssd for you.

adding as much ram as your laptop can accept and keeping an eye on a cpu upgrade on ebay or something would be the best bet for keeping your laptop a little more viable for a couple more years.

 

It's a bunch of steps but looks doable. The screen replacement wasn't hard, just a pain. But for 15 bucks, definitely worth considering.

It's not the 16:9 that bothers me, it's the low resolution.

In general? Right now, I've got Firefox running (with a heap of tabs), 3 Word docs, 2 pdf's in Adobe Reader, Outlook Express. Pretty normal for me, though usually I've got a Excel spreadsheet or two thrown in there as well. The task manager says I'm currently running 66 processes. It's not so much just typing in Word that's slow, it's when I use Track Changes that it gets pretty bad. For a while, I thought the issue was running Adobe at the same time, but that's not it, either.

I do all that basic maintenance pretty much once a week... I use the Auslogics Disk Defrag and Registry Cleaner. I formatted the entire drive last year and that only helped marginally. As far as hardware goes; Dell PC checkup ran a week or two ago and everything came out clean, although it's failed a random seek test before (however, I could not find anything wrong with the hardware scan in setup).

 

Adding RAM is always a good idea. Even for WinXP.

Especially when you're only at 1GB currently.

What I would suggest is buying 4GB RAM (2x2GB modules) and make sure they have a return policy with no restocking fee. You'll know in the first 10 minutes of using your system with the upgraded RAM whether or not the RAM (or lack of it) is what's bottlenecking your system/workflow.

For less than an hour of work (including going to the store to pick them up and even possibly return them...) you'll have your answer.

 

the E6500 and E6510 have the option for WUXGA and FHD screens respectively

 

All the different hard disk manufacturers have a dos diag tool you can usually use to check for bad sectors. Sometimes that can make everything good again. It's really an extreme theory but it's not a hard fix if that's whats giving you some trouble.

Also, Adobe programs in general are resource heavy. Try foxit pdf reader (also free) for a more lightweight solution. Just make sure you remove Adobe first if you plan to use foxit as the two can't coexist happily.

Have you done any playing around with the visual settings for XP? In Classic mode: Control Panel>System>Advanced>Performance Settings opens a dialog that will give you options for better performance or better appearance. The fewer items you have checked the faster your system will run. Anything that is an animation like sliding or fading is what will hog resources.

Lastly, you have a lot of processes running. I'm not going to advise what to keep and what to cut, I'm sure there's plenty of info on here already on how to tackle that.

If you do everything you can to squeeze the most out of your XP installation, AND you install more ram and a better CPU, your laptop will feel brand new all over again.

 

The reason SSD make everything snappier is their fast read/write speeds. This means that operations using the paging file (i.e. virtual RAM), are quicker on a computer with an SSD drive than on a computer with a normal harddrive or a hybrid drive.

Large files, such as uncompressed videos, do not necessarily fit on the amount of RAM available in a system. Editing/manipulating such files requires constant read and write into the harddrive. In this situation using an SSD drive saves a considerable amount of time due to their fast read/write .

 

I have been using foxit reader since I learned about it 3 years ago, and I don't think I'll ever use Adobe reader again

In the same line as micman, there is nothing that can bit a clean install of XP. Also consider building you're own version of Windows using nLite (it's a freeware). It allows the removal of some of Windows' components, the automation of the installation process, the integration of hotfixes , services packs, and driver, tweaks and a few other things.

 

You're right about the E6500; I've haven't seen the E6510 in the Outlet with the screen upgrade since I started looking (at least not close to my budget).

I re-check to see if that's what I used to check the disk when it came up clean. Dell picked up an 'error' once but the disk it. Weird.

Adobe IS terrible; I'll try foxit.

I cut out most of the esthetics when I got the machine (and again when I formatted and did a clean install last May.

I didn't think I was that far above normal, but I'll surf around and see what I can cut. It's at 47 now (with just FF and Outlook open), so I don't know what's going on.

 

kinda off-topic, but since you guys were talking about adobe... i lost respect for adobe acrobat when they decided to not add in acrobat 9 support for microsoft office 2010 and forced users to get adobe acrobat 10 instead. tsk tsk.

 

I'm not sure what's going on with them. The Adobe CS4 and CS5 are really bulky. You want photoshop for instance, a load of other applications that one might not need at all are installed with it.

Also, Adobe seems to favour nVidia over ATi. Their software can take advantage of nVidia GPUs but not of AMD/ATi GPUs... this is a sort of IT racism.

Adobe not cool

 

Adding more memory won't breathe a potent breeze of fresh air into it but it will make using it somewhat smoother. As others have stated here, the CPU will be the limiting aspects here, and I'll also add note that the same will apply to its now dated and slow HDD.

 

Probably just comes down to nVidia paying them to support theirs. nVidia's CUDA is also more n00b friendly than openCL, something I'm sure the adobe team would love.

Instead of making "improvements" to flash, I wish they'd just completely re-code the whole thing. Then maybe it might run well instead of making it the biggest resource hog on the web. If not that then at least mozilla could give you the option of automatically pausing flash when you're on a different tab, that way you wouldn't have it chewing through your CPU time when you have lots of tabs open.

 

adobe produc 99% of them can use ati and only one use only cuda

the real diference is nvidia pay them to tell everyone that it work better with nvidia

 

Definitely up the memory, try 2Gb stick first for total 2.5GB. You can add another 2GB later. (To use more than 3GB you CPU and laptop and OS needs to be 64bit)

Clean install XP (it means without all the Dell bloatware), or as someone mentioned, built your own via nlite. Personally, I've had some issues with nlite when I strip out too many features, I get error message popup windows, nothing major. If that's too extreme for you, disable unnecessary services. Google 'black viper' to see a list of services you can safely disable. This will speed your computer by a lot in my experience.

For that $15 CPU upgrade, that's so cheap, you should try. I've done it since my first P3 laptop.

Download and use CCleaner.

And after all that, it should be a good improvement. If you want to try SSD is da bomb as well. If your're on SATA interface, you will want to use W7, and consider that you can 'take' the SSD on the next laptop you purchase. You can get 64GB (boot drives) for <$100.

 

I'll have to agree with the others on the cpu upgrade. It only took 45 minutes to upgrade to a TL-56 on my old lappy.