Dell Inspiron 9400 RAM upgrading

Hi there.

I have a Dell Inspiron 9400 notebook and I'm currently thinking of upgrading my RAM from the defualt 2GB to 3 or 4GB, but there's a couple of issues I'm not 100% confident on that I would like to ask about.

1. Dell and the Crucial advisor both say that the maximum is 2GB, yet I have heard of people upgrading higher than this. So I decided to try out a 2GB stick from another laptop, and I'm fairly confident it worked. It showed up in the systems screen (Vista 32bit) as having 3GB RAM, does this definitely mean the system can make full use of the 3GB?

2. I've read that memory matching can make a big difference in dual-channel capabale systems such as this one, will it make full use of a 3GB setup because of having to use a 1 and 2GB stick, if not how much would the performance drop? I've read of a 5-10% lower performance for the stated RAM based on miss-matching sticks, is this confirmed anywhere?

Basically, if I do install a 3 or 4G set of sticks, I want to know how I can check that it's definately making full use of it, and there isn't some cap I don't know of.

 

You can try out 3GB, since you know it works when you tested it.... (The i945PM physically supports 4GB, depends if the BIOS is locked down - to support only 2-3GB..!!)
To utilize 4GB, you will need a 64-bit OS....

Go for the memory with the same latency and frequency....

The difference won't be much and not noticeable in real-world performance, so go with 3GB if you want to stick with Vista x86-32....

 

Thanks for the reply.

I'm presuming though that if it says in control panel > system, that "memory (ram): 3GB", that the bios hasn't locked it out?

 

I think the BIOS will support it....