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If there’s an upgrade you really should do it yourself, it’s adding more ram. When I last checked, a DDR2 PC 6400/800 2GB ram cost less than $40. So what are you waiting for? “But I don’t know what type of ram to buy, whether it’s “compatible, how to change it”. Doesn’t that sound familiar? If that’s what stopping you, then I am here to help.

Before we start, there are a few things you need to know:

• How much ram does my system currently have
• Can I still upgrade?
• What type of ram to buy
• How to install the ram

Getting Started

To answer the first 3 questions, you need CPU-Z. Head over and download the application. It’s a very light application, and requires no installation.

Once the download finishes, you open up the zip content.

Click on cpuz.exe to run the application, no installation required.

This is the main application tab. Why not take this opportunity to know what powers your system, and just to double check the specification is what you paid for. Especially for D.I.Y PCs.

Moving on to the mainboard tab, this is important if you do not know what is the highest speed of ram your mainboard can support. What you really need to do is just to look at the model and google it to get the specification of your mainboard. If you can’t find the exact model, just google for the chipset, and although the brand and model might be different, the supported memory will be similar. If you really have no idea what I am talking about, it is ok to skip this step.

This tells you your current memory setup and settings.

This is where can find out what type of ram to buy by looking at the “Maximum Bandwidth” specification. In this case, it’s PC2-6400 (400MHZ). Now you can go down to tell the IT guy you want a PC2 6400 ram with pride!

What the “Slot#” implies is the place where you put in your ram. If you have got an empty slot, you just need to go put in the new ram in that slot, and your total memory is slot#1 + slot#2. If there’s no empty slot, you will need to replace a old one with the new ram

Note: If your mainboard supports up to DDR2 PC 5300 for example, you can still go ahead and buy PC 6400 or higher speed range, provided they are still in the DDR2 category. The high speed ram will merely underclock and run at “reduced performance” at PC5300 instead. Generally speaking, there are three main types of ram, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, and incompatibility is between these 3 types, rather then the speed of the ram. Other rams you might come across is PC100 and PC133 in legacy devices, which are both incompatible.

You can put two pieces of ram of the same type (e.g: DDR2) with different speed together, However, the higher speed will always underclock to run at the speed of the lower spec ram.

The above illustration should answer your 3 question:

• How much ram does my system currently have – 2048mb (You can also right click on “My Computer” to find out this info)
• Can I still upgrade? – Do I have an empty slot? If not I will have to replace one of the old ram
• What type of ram to buy – If my PC can currently run with PC5300, then I should buy this. However, if I want to future proof it, I should check my mainboard model or chipset and determine what is the maximum memory speed it can support.

Get Your Hands Dirty

Now that you have that shiny new ram, how do you fix on the new ram? Well, if a picture says a thousand words, how much is a video and narration worth……

Laptop

Desktop

Congratulations. You have made it!