The importance of RAM!

Sometimes it seems we do things for the sake of it, or to prove something, that we don’t really need to do!

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been struggling away with a very slow Windows 7 install on an Acer Aspire One netbook with only 512Mb of RAM.  I’ve spent time finding ways to improve the experience, but although it worked reasonably, there were still regular holdups, especially if I tried to run more than one program at a time.

The other day I snapped and thought ‘so how much would more RAM cost me?’ and it turns out to be not a lot!  I bought a 1Gb 200-pin SODIMM for less than £20 and looked forward to speedy netbooking.

Next, I looked for an installation guide online and found people complaining about how difficult it was to add RAM to the Aspire One.  But I wasn’t going to be put off!  I followed through one of the online guides and didn’t have any difficulties until it came time to remove the motherboard.  My Aspire One has a hard drive and guide was written for the SSD model, but I realised that by undoing the three screws holiding the smaller circuit board on the right hand side, the motherboard would be released.  That issue overcome, I put the machine back together without difficulty, and booted it up.

There’s that moment of dread whenever I turn on something I’ve taken to bits, but shockingly, the machine booted into action as normal, and on checking the memory in Windows it confirmed I now have 1.5Gb. 

The performance of the machine is vastly improved – bootup is amazingly quicker, opening any application is vastly quicker and general use of the machine is, well…., quicker!

If you are struggling away on a slow computer with not enough RAM, do it, do it now!!