Can I upgrade RAM on my 9 year old laptop

[arnprasad]

Hi..I have a 9 year old Dell Inspiron 9300 bought from US

It had the best specs at that time
17 inch 1080p screen, intel pentium, 1GB of ram, nvidia 6800...etc.

Over the past 5 years it has been rarely used since I have other laptops and desktops at home

It had windows xp and even doing some basic tasks like opening a browser used to take minutes...so I clean in stalled windows 7 on it and now its slightly better but even now things that should take 1-2 secs take 10-20 secs and its very frustrating.

Not really sure what to do, but I was hoping that if I bump the RAM to 4GB..hopefully it will make things faster.

Please let me know if its possible, what are the technical specifications and where can I buy it and for how much.

Dell Inspiron 9300 Review (pics, specs)

 

[Saket]

The system has DDR2 RAM. If you can find it, you can upgrade. Please check if the 1GB RAM pre-installed is 1GBX1 or 512X2; just for knowing if there are empty slots. There are a couple of slots generally on laptops. You can expect some boost in performance if you go for more RAM, however, I have a feeling that Win XP SP3 will be a better bet rather than Win7/8 as it will 'eat' lesser resources.

 

[haisaikat]

@arnprasad, you mentioned 1080p but your specs link says below

WXGA+ (1440900) Ultrasharp 17? widescreen LCD (non-glossy, non TrueLife)

Nevertheless, I second Saket that for this single core Laptop with 533 MHZ Ram (seems there should be 2 slots) windows XP will be a better bet for casual browsing and RAM upgrade may or may not improve the performance but you can also couple that with a newer hdd upgrade to speed up loading of programs. At most use this as a download machine with proper cooling.

 

[ranjeetrain]

Finding a RAM for this laptop would definitely be a huge challenge. If you can post clear pictures of the RAM used in the laptop, we may offer some qualified assistance keeping guesswork out of this.

Also you need to check if there is only one slot in the machine or more than one.

IMO, Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7 SP 1 are equally resource consuming. So the call on the OS has to be made purely based on your usage and availability of supported software. Since Windows XP is officially dead, I'd suggest Windows 7.

Even then the machine will not be good for more than casual usage. Even web surfing will be slow unless you only work with 1 window at a time. Many people, including myself, open several windows together and work switching around them. The machine will be quite slow for that purpose. But it will be fine for casual usage such as music listening, light web surfing, email, photo viewing. It will make for a great travel laptop.

 

[arnprasad]

I am 99% sure it has two slots and they got 512 MB each.

Also I had genuine windowzs XP on it that i replaced with downloaded Windows 7 so do I install XP now after downloading from torrentz?

Also how can a high end laptop from 9 years back struggle to do even the basic tasks? is it because the hardware has aged and hence will not perform? coz I was doing video editing on this and hence suprised that it cannot even open browsers fast enough now...am sure opening a browser today or 9 years ago needed the same amount of resources...am I wrong?

Also the Link that says it was 1440P was just an example..mine has 1080P.

if this laptop cant even perform basic daily tasks...what else can I do with it please?

 

[ranjeetrain]

With two slots you should be able to ramp it up to 2GB provided you can find the RAM. Did you check the manual? What does it say about the maximum RAM supported by this machine?

Hardware can perform the same or degrade due to age. It is the software that evolves daily. Hardware is barely able to keep up with the advances in software. Websites 9 years ago used to be comparatively lightweight. Now they are gigantic in comparison. They would need anything between 5 to 10 times the resources.

No doubt it must have been a great machine back in the days. But it's just too old to be relevant now.

What else can you do with it? Hmmm... make it a music only PC :lol: (What other advice would you expect)

 

[harrsha]

if possible try to install any linux distro...lite version on this.....say puppy linux or any thing that suits u ..and boot it from USB if this option is available....and try it out..mostly this should work out for old laptops...

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Found RAM upgrade fro my 10-yr-old Compaq! It is DDR2 or possibly even earlier

Has one slot, was filled with 256Mb, spec said max 1Gb, and local repair shop was able to supply. Whilst it will never be the zippiest machine (also it's WinXP has never been re-installed) the upgrade made a noticeable and worthwhile difference.

 

[asliarun]

The biggest upgrade you can make to your system (or to most systems) is the hard drive. The 5200rpm drive has the same effect on your system as dragging a tree log with your car.

Try replacing the your drive with an SSD first.

You might be able to find DDR2 RAM (salvaged from old systems) in the part of town where you have lots of computer assembly and electronics shops (Nehru place in Delhi, forgot the Bangalore equivalent).

The biggest advantage of increasing your RAM is that your OS will not need to use the page file in your HDD as heavily. Again, this is where the SSD will really give you the performance boost - as it will allow your OS to access the page file dramatically faster than your old hard drive.

I have been disabling my page file for many years now, since the XP days, and I have always got a huge performance boost in regular activities as well as in boot times. The only downside is that you run the risk of a blue screen if your OS runs out of memory. The next best thing is to specify a page file on an SSD (your best option) but make it fixed size. By that, I mean set the min size and max size the same, instead of letting Windows manage your page file size dynamically.

But I am speaking very generically. You will need to see what type of connector your motherboard uses to talk to your hard drive, and find a 2.5" SSD that uses the same connector.

Finally, what browser do you use? You should try Chrome or Firefox, not IE.

Here's a guessing game that illustrates this:

 

[jsmithe]

Very good suggestions and insights on this thread, so I'll just add a few free tools that will help you see what's eating your PC's resources.

Process Explorer
Process Monitor
System Explorer - Keep Your System Under Control
Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring

Download and switch to the performance graphs in them to see what's causing the slow down. You'll also get an idea of what resource is being maxxed out (CPU, RAM, HDD, Network etc.) and will know what to upgrade instead of going shotgun (spray and pray) on upgrading.

 

[doors666]

I also have an old laptop, thinkpad tp42. its about as old as yours, but it has 2gb ram. It works fine for kids use, lightweight browsing, small time games for kids, youtube etc. I am using windows 7 on it.

you can goto sp road, I think you should be able to find the ram there, or search on ebay.

 

[Saket]

Here I go too! I have a 2006 Acer laptop which I bought during my college days. It has 256 MB of default RAM with 60 GB HDD and an Intel Centrino 1.7GHz CPU, with original XP Home. The only upgrades I have done is installed 2.5GB of RAM (2GB + 512 MB) in the two slots, and migrated to XP SP3. Don't have any complains for regular work like surfing, browsing, word processing, some Photoshop etc.

I suggest you upgrade RAM & HDD (with 7200 rpm) and do a clean install of XP SP3. Should work satisfactorily well.

Regards.