Upgrade 4G to 8G RAM

Hi all!

This is my very first post in notebookreview, I hope you can confirm my thoughts and clear my doubts

First my laptop is an Alienware M17 with 4 GB RAM and the last BIOS B14 version already installed which supports those 8GB I want to upgrade.

My current 4GB RAM is

2 x ELPIDA 2GB DDR3 PC2-8500 SO-DIMM 1067MHZ.

Reading here and there I found a 8GB RAM module listed here:

KINGSTON TECHNOLOGY 8GB, 1066MHz, DDR3, ECC Reg w/Par, CL7, DIMM (Kit of 2) QR, x8 w/Therm Sen · P/N KVR1066D3Q8R7SK2/8G
VALUERAM 8GB (2X4GB)


So.. could somebody tell me I chose the right one? Of course, I accept any better suggestion than mine!


Thanks!!

 

Hi luisendor, and welcome to the forums!

The Kingston ram you mentioned is actually desktop ram which will not be compatible with your M17 laptop. Take a look at this list:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0381 1052939102 1309139890&name=8GB (2 x 4GB)

Any of these would work for you.

 

Why do you want more than 4GB of memory?

 

I will answer you with another question, why are notebooks comming with 8GB RAM nowadays?


hehe..

Sometimes, puntually, I get some famous stuttering and slow video frame processing.
After upgrading from Vista to W7 x64, upgrade drivers, BIOS, etc.. this problem appears only when RAM is full or almost full.

So, I think that with 8GB RAM, I will never get stuttering and slow video frame processing under any stress situation ever!

Note: 6GB is quite enough, but I like the path 1, 2, 4 ,8, 16

OMG!

That is the reason I wanted your advise!

By the way.. how can I know the difference in that terms.. I mean, where did you see here that this RAM is for desktop, instead for notebook?

""KINGSTON TECHNOLOGY 8GB, 1066MHz, DDR3, ECC Reg w/Par, CL7, DIMM (Kit of 2) QR, x8 w/Therm Sen · P/N KVR1066D3Q8R7SK2/8G
VALUERAM 8GB (2X4GB)""



Thanks thanks David

 

You want SO-DIMMs, not DIMMs. Just CPU-Z and look for the same type you have (in your case, it looks like DDR3-1067).

 

Aaahm.. that is nice.

Thanks again for your support. I believe I will be able to buy the right one now

 

I can't believe that someone is still asking this kind of questions in 2010

Not even 6GB can satisfy my daily usage on my desktop. When I open some webpages, run 1 virtual machine and one instance of WoW I get low memory warning. (There are ppl who don't like virtual memory.)

 

Most of them don't still, actually, but that's a separate issue.

What, exactly, are you doing when you get the stuttering and slow video frames? Unless you're doing running some very heavy duty programs (games don't usually count, but virtual machines definitely do), lack of RAM is probably not your issue. Due to the way W7 and Vista handle memory, your memory will usually appear full or almost full due to the fact that the OS tries to pre-load things into memory, since, after all, unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Do you have an older M17, or one of the newer M17x's? If you have one of the older M17s, your problem may lie more in your graphics card than in your RAM.

 

So, i could go just a couple weeks back and most people on here did think that 4GB was plenty, and, uh, now it apparently isn't. Why is this? Too much propaganda from the latest gen notebooks in my opinion.

 

4GB is plenty for most folks now.
When ram drops to under $200 for 8GB I may jump on the 8GB bandwagon.

 

*sigh* /10char

 

Well.

My laptop is an older M17, with 2 crossfire ATI 3780, Q9300 2.53Ghz.

With Windows Vista x64, as my laptop was delivered from Alienware, it was awfull.. Not only that problem, furthermore, after it, the laptop brought the blue screen. And the situation was repeated many times.
Finally I installed W7 x64, and the only moment I have seen the problem again was:

As my partner sniper_sung, I play wow, and I was downloading the entire client again. You know it open many connections and besides, at one time, the installation begins while downloading, which uses CPU and RAM as if it is the only proccess in the laptop! in the world!
And, I started Batman Arkham Asylum, that eats from 1 to 1.5 GB RAM.

At that situation (with additional some other webs, and tools (resources monitor. task manager), Batman started to stuttering and slow video frames. This situation was kept until the installation of wow finished.


This situation was a mix RAM and CPU lack. I checked it and my 4 CPU's were running at 100%, and there were not free RAM, and about 1.2GB of wait RAM, so 2.8G was used RAM.


I understand your point, anyway. But what else can I do to free CPU load and skip the wasted RAM, than put more RAM? I can not fight again the way W7 manages RAM.


Any better idea? Please!

 

I don't see why it isn't a valid question. 99% of users do not need more than 4GB.

 

Luisendor,
Your problem sounds more like an issue with your hard drive speed and not RAM. Batman stopping stuttering when a download finishes seems like it is more because of storage thrashing

 

I still don't see a reason for 8 Gb other than 'just because' (translated to: status).

4Gb so-dimms are horribly expensive. So much so that in the greater scheme of things, it might be more effective to get a NEW machine with 8Gb from the factory, enjoy the 2-3 years warranty, and sell your current machine to offset part of the upgrade cost.

Before doing that though, as others have said, you need to understand what is going on in your machine.

RAM/CPU is generally the fastest part of any machine. Adding 'more' of that expensive/fast resource without making damned sure that the slowest parts of your machine (disk, graphics, network) aren't the real problem is foolish.

Your machine cannot be faster than the slowest bottleneck in the system.

 

Well nowadays , u can get laptops with 16GB and for those laptops , 8GB is quite cheap since u use 4X2GB modules....

 

so what???

The number of affordable laptops with more than two so-dimm slots is pretty small, no?

 

I agree. Though I would have used the term wasteful.

Anyway, like it's already been said a million times, you don't need more than 4 GB of RAM unless you have a specific application that requires it.

 

You are not the only one wants/needs 8GB of RAM. I'm going to upgrade to 8BG or 6GB soon as I can. I'm getting all my 4GB used up sometimes...

 

Your issue with Vista, unless you did a clean install yourself, may have been more with Alienware's Command Center or some of the other software they tend to install. I remember seeing many, many, posts of problems with Command Center slowing things down and just generally making life miserable.

I'm not sure what you mean by "wait RAM" (I'm still on XP, myself). If it is what I suspect it might be, then that's just RAM that W7 has pre-loaded programs into to start them up faster. The thing is, if you actually need that RAM to run currently running programs, W7 will dump any pre-loaded programs and use the RAM as needed, so there's no real need to "fight" W7's memory usage.

Pitabred's suggestion about hard drive access may have more merit, especially if I'm wrong about "wait RAM" and your RAM actually was full, which means that your system was going to the page file, which would just exacerbate your hard drive use, especially when coupled with your downloads and installs. Even if I'm not wrong, if it occurred while you're moving around to newer areas and doing other things that would require disk access, it may still have been enough.

Still and all, in the end it sounds like this is a pretty isolated case, unless you tend to reinstall WoW a lot. It'll still cost you around $400 (in the US, probably more outside) right now to upgrade to 8 GB of RAM, so unless you're sure this is the problem, and this sort of thing happens often, I don't know that it'd actually be worth it.