RAM question

M

mdh157

New Member
Hello,

I have a Dell Dimension E310 with a Pentium 4, 3.0GHz with 1 MB of DDR2 SDRAM, speed of 400MHz. i have been told this is expandable to 2 Gig of Ram. Assuming this is correct, would I be better off a) trying to find another matching spec memory stick, b) upgrading all of the RAM to a higher speed (I assume it is possible as long as the new RAM is DDR2 SDRAM)?

We mostly use the comp for web surfing & pics. It is 3.5 years old and works ok, but recently it has been running very slow, and when I open the task manager it shows almost 100% CPU usage, and you can hear it winding up (the fan running, perhaps?). I am not sure if the additional RAM would correct this or if its just old or if the motherboard is on its last legs or what.

i'd love to buy a new comp but it is not in the budget for probably another year.
 
You should be able to use any DDR2 RAM... Now some computers can be very particular about their memory, but it should support any speed and clock it down to whatever it's maximum is, or whatever the slowest stick installed is.

Just realize RAM is sort of a mixed bag. It doesn't increase actual speed, but it relieves your hard drive from doing quite as much work with the swap file/virtual memory. However, typically when you really need more RAM the hard drive is extremely active but the CPU is fairly low. I'm not saying more RAM wouldn't help, but I suspect you have other problems. You may consider downloading Hijackthis and posting the log here. In a new thread through ;)
 
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