[Archived] Increase Ram

[Iceman]

Hi guys

Any idea how i can increase my Ram. My pc has become rather slow of late. I know i can put in more ram sticks, but are there any programs or things you can check or uninstall to speed things up?

Cheers

Iccers

[LeChuck]

Use the http://www.crucial.com/systemscanner/Crucial Memory Scanner to find out what sort of RAM you need. Then just look at whatever cheap computer stores they have over there (or Ebay as last resort) and find the right kind. Hopefully it will be DDR2 which is dirt cheap. If you tell me how much memory you have installed already I can tell you if it's likely to be the lack of RAM or just the state of your computer that's likely to be causing the speed issues.

If you haven't formatted your computer in 12 months then that will slow it up a lot as well. If it's a lot more than 12 months then that will make it even slower obviously. There are plenty of programs that claim to clean computers up but none of them work anywhere near as well as formatting. Auslogics BoostSpeed is okay and has a free 30 day trial. Use the various programs on there to remove all the programs you don't use/need, do a computer clean up, do a registry clean up, and then defragment both your hard drives and your memory. I know that sounds a lot but it's a very easy to use program, it's no more effort than a couple of clicks per procedure.

[Iceman]

Cheers LeChuck. Its an oldish Acer laptop. 512mb ram, and yeah its DDR2. Im not concerned about hard drive space, as i have a 500GB external harddrive. I have quite a few programmes installed which might hurt my memory as well, and havent done a format for ages. Maybe i should just format the entire laptop, and remove all those programmes. Do u think that will work?

[LeChuck]

Having only 512mb will mean it's slow anyway. You should be able to add 1gb to that for very little cost, and it will make a difference.

When I said about uninstalling things, doing a clean-up and then defragmenting - this wasn't to save hard drive space but to speed up the laptop. A format and install is still the far better option though, and as you have a large external hard drive I presume you won't have any problem backing up things you don't want to lose in the process. It wouldn't do any harm to try using Auslogics first and seeing if you're happy with the results or not.

[Iceman]

Is there a way to save the programmes i have installed, before formatting or is that impossible? Im assuming its the latter, but if anybody knows how to or if you can then let me know. LeChuck??

[LeChuck]

I'm fairly sure you can't save programs you have installed. It could be an idea to download all the set-up files onto your external hard drive before you format - might make the process after formatting a bit easier.

Having said that though...there is plenty of 'backup' software around. I've never actually used any of them, so it is possible that some of them could back up programs in the way that you want. I'd still recommend a clean format/install though.

[OhmiBRFC]

It's not possible to save programmes installed in Windows. It is possible to save data though, you just need to locate the save file.