Adding RAM to my laptop

[dominican2589]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1520 with 2GB of RAM. I am using about 60-70% of my RAM most of the times. I want to upgrade my RAM the cheapest way possible. I have Vista Home Premium 32-bit so I know if i upgrade to 4GB RAM it will not see everything. So my options are to get a 2GB stick and remove one of my 1GB stick to get 3GB of RAM or just get two 2GB RAM sticks.

Which one would you recommand so that I can hope to see some speed increase?

 

[Hefemeister]

Look inside the laptop to ensure that you can replace both ram sticks. Generally one cannot be replaced so then you would go with the one 2gb stick for a total of 3gb.

 

[saltynay]

Its running at 60-70% usage because thats how vista works its got prefetch so it preloads the programs you use most so that they load up quicker. You can turn it off if you want but with 2gb of ram you still going to have 600mb of ram available for random actions which is more then enough. You won't get a speed increase in the standard laptop usage environment by upgrading the ram if you want more speed then upgrade the hdd

 

[dominican2589]

Both RAM sticks are accessable to me. The reason I want to upgrade the RAM is because I am planning on getting a tuner and have tried it out and the RAM quickly jumped up to above 90%. I also play games such as Spore and The Sims 2 so I think I would benefit from that. What I do not want is for it to slow down because I have unmatched RAM sticks, one being 1GB and the other 2GB.

 

[saltynay]

Ok use a utility like Everest home to get the motherboard model number then find out how ram much its max capacity is. Thats normal ram levels on vista although prefetch is dynamic and it adjusts its preload space according to ram usage. There must be a utility so that you can tell how much ram prefetch is using if its not in the ctrl+alt+del processes section. I am on Mac atm and my vista laptop is in the car.