About Lauren Bennett Expertise I am a computer science major and my dad is an Electric Engineering, so my life has revolved around computers. For as long as I can remember, I have been buying and selling computers. I tend to travel a lot, so I have always had a laptop. I have bought 5 of them for myself, and bought around 30-40 for friends and family. I have dealt with the good and the bad of various version and brand names. If you are in need of buying a laptop, feel free to contact me and I'm sure I will be able to guide you into purchasing the laptop that will be the best fit for you. I will custom build you computers for you to choose from so you can get an exact idea of what to go and buy when you do it yourself and so that you have an exact price. However, I am in the USA and am only knowledgeable about computers here in the US. I do not know about foreign currency or the quality of computer brand names outside the US.
Experience B.S. in Computer Science. Buying and selling for years. Assisting friends/family.
Question QUESTION: Hello,
I have a couple questions about my laptop. I have a Dell Inspiron 1720 notebook.
I have 1Gb of Ram, 2 sticks. I want to upgrade badly, it is running pretty slow with vista, but good, just Warcraft runs slow.
I want to know first, how much total can i have in the system, 4Gb or 2Gb?
Can i have only 1 stick of 2Gb since its cheaper, or do I have to have 2 sticks the whole time?
Is it better to buy from Dell, or is it better to buy it from somewhere else cheaper?
If you could answer those, that would be great, thanks.
ANSWER: You can have up to 4GB of RAM but your operating system can only read 3GB of RAM. The 64-bit versions of Vista are the only operating system that can utilize the 4GB of RAM, but they are very buggy and are not compatible with most hardware and software.
You should have two sticks in at all times. I haven't really researched all the reasoning behind it, but there needs to be a balance between the two.
You can buy memory from anywhere. Just make sure it is the right type. I typically buy my memory from buy.com or newegg.com. Here is a link at New Egg to get you started looking at the right type of memory for your computer.
QUESTION: I know that vista is a very big memory hog. Would it be best to buy the 4gb anyway, since i would like to utilize the 3gb.
I also read that you cant mix a 1gb with a 2gb, is that true?
Answer I went ahead and upgraded to 4GB of RAM in my laptop. You can do it a lot cheaper than buying the laptop originally that way. Additionally, you can sell your old memory on eBay and make like $10-$20 off of it.
I personally haven't read that you can't mix 1GB and 2GB sticks of memory, but how else would you get 3GB in two memory slots? I just sold my XPS M1210 and bought an XPS M1330 which has 3GB of memory because it just came like that. I haven't looked inside but I would assume one slot has a 2GB stick and the other slot has a 1GB stick. However, they sell packages on NewEgg that are 2x2GB of memory to get the 4GB so it would probably be the same price or cheaper to do it that way anyway! Depending on your motherboard, you will either utilize 3GB of 3.5GB, so you might as well just go with the 4GB anyways :)
