New, looking to upgrade.

Hello, my name is Kevin. I'm not the greatest when it comes to computers but I am looking to upgrade my Dell Inspiron 6400 hard drive and memory. I've been researching for awhile and I have found a couple hard drives that I'm interested in but I want to makes sure they'll be compatible first. Currently it has an 80gb hard drive and I'm not sure how much RAM. Is there a way to find this without tearing stuff apart?

The first is Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVTRTL 500GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s

and the other is Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s

As for RAM I am not sure, can anyone recommend? I'm looking for 1gb or more.

Thanks ahead of time.

 

Either of those hard drives will work in the 6400.

As for memory, you're looking for any speed of DDR2, though 667MHz is preferable. Slower memory will run at slower speeds and faster memory will clock down to 667MHz, but the memory speed will not significantly affect performance. Officially the E1505 can do 2GB of memory, but many people have gotten 3GB or 4GB to work.

 

both hard drives will work but the 320GB scorpio black will be faster... for RAM , any DDR2-667 or DDR2-800 stick will work but personally i would get the cheaper one...

 

Thank you both for responding.

After some looking around I've discovered that my computer has 2gb of Ram already, would it be worth upgrading to 4 gb? And if so would it be better to use one 4gb stick or two 2gb sticks? I understand that the comp can't recognise all 4gb but would it speed anything up?

I was looking at these and using two of them.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220229

 

A bit depends on how your computer is currently setup. Most notebooks come with 2 memory slots (a few with 4, but that's not your case). If you have 2x 1 GB SODIMMs (1 in each slot), you'd need to go ahead and buy either 2x 2 GB SODIMMs or 1x 4 GB SODIMM (I'd recommend the pair of 2 GB SODIMMs... 4 GB SODIMMs are very expensive still). If you're lucky, and your 2 GB of memory is actually a single 2 GB stick, then you could actually just buy 1 2 GB stick, stick it in your open slot, and have 4 GB of memory.

As for speeding things up, a lot depends on how you use your computer. If you just do general web surfing or office tasks, you probably won't notice much improvement unless you do a lot of multi-tasking, in which case, you'll probably notice some (since it can keep a lot of programs in memory instead of having to reload them from the HDD). These days, 4 GB is a relatively cheap and easy upgrade, anyway.