Increasing RAM

[Wodrick]

I was recently forced to replace my lap top due to the previous one failing the wine immersion test.

As I have a severe lack of funds I had to get the cheapest one I could. It is an acer Aspire 5336 running W7 Home Premium 64 bit.

It's performance is turgid, always has been, I put this down to low RAM as it only has 2mb in one of the two slots.

I am basing this on the extraordinary amount of Hard Disk activity.
I read that W7 64 is happiest with 8mb RAM, but Crucial are only offering a 4mb upgrade when I run their analyser. Is this right for the motherboard or are they ignoring the operating system?
Help if possible.

[Mike-Bracknell]

2Gb is workable for RAM on a Win7 machine.
4Gb is advisable once you start to do other things, such as using large installed programs.
Anything above 4Gb is only ever going to be addressable if you have the 64bit version of Windows 7.
8Gb is probably overkill unless you're doing a lot of photoshop etc.

Don't completely trust the Crucial tool, research the motherboard's capabilities with the manufacturer. However, 4Gb would suit, but I would suggest a defrag of the hard drive and probably spending some of the cash saved from not going to 8Gb on an SSD would give the best bang for buck.

[Milo Minderbinder]

two problems here
2GB is the absolute minimum to run Win7 - doubling it to 4GB would be the cheapest way of getting an upgrade. Taking it beyond 4GB won't make much further difference
the other problem is the CPU - most of these were fitted with Celerons. Nothing much you can do about that - the machine is essentially compromised as a result.
Only other thing you can really try is to optimise the software - uninstall / disable as much of the bundled Acer bloatware as possible, and use an antivirus program which doesn't have too much of a memory footprint. Disable things like Realplayer and Quicktime from loading at startup.
However its easy to get that kind of thing wrong and cripple the machine

[Saab Dastard]

Looking at the specs on the Acer site, that model has slots for 2 x SODIMMS, max 4GB - i.e. 2 x 2GB DDR3 modules.

Acer Support: Acer Aspire 5336 Notebook Series Specifications (http://support.acer.com/acerpanam/notebook/2010/Acer/Aspire/Aspire5336/Aspire5336sp3.shtml)

Obviously, you've already got 2GB installed, so you just want to get 1 x 2GB module of the correct spec.

I've got 4 x desktops and 1 x laptop at home, all running Win 7 Pro x64 happily in 4GB RAM. OK, none are used for games, but no-one in the family is complaining about poor performance!

Agree with what Milo says about disabling junk. You don't specify which model you have, single-core or dual-core Celeron. If it's a single core Celeron... Well, there's your problem, as they say.

SD

[Wodrick]

Thanks for that *SD* That's what I couldn't find, so 4Gb it is.

Most of the other stuff I do as routine, I have been mucking around with these things since the TRS-80 Mk1!

[mustpost]

Mike-B has it, Wodrick (and others). I find 8gb ram Win7 64 bit is now becoming slow for my video edit suite..:( And it was a fast chip 2 years ago...