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General discussion

ram question

Aug 12, 2012 1:03AM PDT

Hi there,

I am currently tryingto get a laptop working for my girlfriend.

It is running Vista Home Premium and has 2gb of Ram in one slot with a spare slot.

I have a compatible (it would fit in the slot) stick of 1gb I could put into the spare slot.

Is this unwise?

Thanks in advance

C

Discussion is locked

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Re: RAM
Aug 12, 2012 1:13AM PDT

Why not check the memory advisor at crucial.com for that particular laptop?

Two things:
- speed: if the new stick physically fits but is slower, the old stick will be slowdowned also
- symmetry: generally it's advised to use the same capacity for a pair and 2 and 1 aren't the same

So it might be a bad idea.

Kees

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I'd say it depends
Aug 12, 2012 2:38AM PDT

I'd say it depends on what the goal is. While the ideal scenario is having matched pairs of RAM with identical specs, it's generally only the people who spend half their day running benchmarking programs, and the other half making minor tweaks to get a couple extra points, that are going to care about some of the potentially negative side effects.

On the whole, more RAM is always going to be faster than using swap. Probably by hundreds of times with SSDs, and thousands of times with HDDs. But if you're not experiencing a lack of RAM, then faster RAM would be better. With Vista on 2GB of RAM though, I'd say that extra 1GB would probably be worth it, even if it slows down the RAM on the whole. This is especially true if the laptop has an integrated chipset carving out a chunk of the system RAM for its own use. For my money, 2GB is the minimum you'd want to run Vista on, and so if you have an integrated graphics chip taking away up to a half-GB before you even get to loading the OS, an extra 1GB will not only replenish what was lost, but give you a small surplus.