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Adding more RAM...
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| miamitranceman |
Hey guys, I've got an over 4 yr old Dell Inspiron 8200 Laptop. (P4M 2.0 ghz) It meets all my basic needs and even runs Torq pretty much perfectly. I currently have 768 RAM in it (1 512 and 1 256) and I was gonna upgrade to 1 gig, which is the max that the specs say on Dell's website and other RAM stores online. However, I have heard that upgrading more than the specified max can be fine. I was thinking of trying to go to 2 gigs but I don't wanna fry my poor system after all these years. Is there anything I should be worried about like overheating or just general crashing/incompatability?
Thanks fellas.
MTM |
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| jdat |
if you put more than the recommended max any of the following could happen:
computer doesn't startup ( error beeps on startup )
doesn't recognize the full amount of the ram so it will view it as less than what it is supposed to be
I am sure there are more possibilities but in any case too much ram won't fry your computer or damage it.
Either it will work ( most probably at an inferior size ) or won't.
For a pc that old the investement and the hassle just isn't worth it. You really won't see much of an improvement. |
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| GrimReaper |
For PCs older than a couple of years, adding more RAM usually doesn't improve the overall performance more than just marginally because the latest softwares and games and such demand so much the change from 768 to 1gig doesn't make that big of a difference really.
Depending how much you wanna spend on the upgrading, go for it. But for "overRAMing", i strongly doubt it will recognize any more than what's the specified max amount or it won't startup at all as jdat already said there. |
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| TigerClaw |
| XP doesn't support 4GB of ram, But the 64bit version does. |
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| NeoPhono |
| You should see if there are any upgrades for the motherboard BIOS. I'm not sure how upgradeable Dell motherboards are (probably not much), but if you can flash to a new version that is able to deal with more than a gig of RAM I'd do it. I personally believe that for the price, upgrading RAM is the most beneficial of all computer upgrades. Depending on the core, and again the BIOS, you could also look at overclocking your processor a bit. You could easily squeeze a few more Hz out of it. You could probably look around and see if anyone else with your model of computer has been able to make similar upgrades. |
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| miamitranceman |
Actually, I just did a little more research in the Dell community forums and people have been putting 2 gigs in with no problems at all! Apparently the manual lagged behind the memory capabilities and the 8200 has the same motherboard as another Dell laptop which supports 2 gigs according to Dell.
Sweet. |
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| miamitranceman |
| I'm happy to report I've had no problems so far. The 2 gigs are fully recognized and Torq is running even better. Still gonna do some extensive testing at home before I play out though. |
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| DJ Lac |
| you'll have bottlenecks if you have 2 gigs becuase that is an old system. You have to make sure your cpu can match the ram so one is not overpowering the other. It's better to just build your pc it's a lot cheaper whole sale thats what. |
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