INCREASED RAM, NO NOTICABLE IMPROVEMENT

[JJCRU23R]

gday, ive added 1gig of RAM to my brothers toshiba satellite laptop. according to the manual it said you can add upto 2gig in the extra space it has, but all we could afford is 1gig.

as far as i can see, the PC is still pretty slow going, so i am guessing i gotta change some sort of setting in order to get the most of the extra ram.

anyone know what i should do, where ishould look to adjust the settings?

the laptop is a pentium 4 with winxp, ati mobility radeon 9000...

toshiba satellite a30

4 cpu 2.80ghz

912mhz 192mb ram.

just throwing in any and all information i can find on this laptop.

any advice would be greatly appreciated.

jase

[GtiRboy]

Right-click on My-computer and hit properties, and under the heading "Computer" see if it has registered the memory in there, i.e it should say "1GB of RAM" or your 1GB plus whatever was in there in the first place.

If it still only says 192mb RAM, you may have to fiddle with the bios... I'd google it as thats all i do

EDIT - Oh and before you play with anything in the bios, google it all first, if you change the wrong thing the laptop may not function properly...

Edited February 20, 2009 by GtiRboy

[Ascendant Rice]

if its vista try turn of windows aero

[Jaaassseeee]

Truthfully speaking, with the applications the computers are running these days I really think 1gig RAM is insufficient.

My gfx card alone allows up to 1g speed under hyper memory, which means it'll take extra memory from other sources. so if i had only 1gig ram it means i'm left with 256mb to work with.

and i highly doubt ur lappy will only take 2gig ram. take out the 1gig stick and slap on 2 x 2gig sticks ;)

i haven't looked at computers/laptops lately so dont quote me on this, best to take it to the shops and ask them for recommendation. it's not like they can charge u for asking a quesiton right?

[quantum]

Truthfully speaking, with the applications the computers are running these days I really think 1gig RAM is insufficient.

My gfx card alone allows up to 1g speed under hyper memory, which means it'll take extra memory from other sources. so if i had only 1gig ram it means i'm left with 256mb to work with.

and i highly doubt ur lappy will only take 2gig ram. take out the 1gig stick and slap on 2 x 2gig sticks ;)

i haven't looked at computers/laptops lately so dont quote me on this, best to take it to the shops and ask them for recommendation. it's not like they can charge u for asking a quesiton right?

if his laptop is pretty old odds are the motherboard can only support up to 2gigs ram

[Keisari]

gday, ive added 1gig of RAM to my brothers toshiba satellite laptop. according to the manual it said you can add upto 2gig in the extra space it has, but all we could afford is 1gig.

as far as i can see, the PC is still pretty slow going, so i am guessing i gotta change some sort of setting in order to get the most of the extra ram.

anyone know what i should do, where ishould look to adjust the settings?

the laptop is a pentium 4 with winxp, ati mobility radeon 9000...

toshiba satellite a30

4 cpu 2.80ghz

912mhz 192mb ram.

just throwing in any and all information i can find on this laptop.

any advice would be greatly appreciated.

jase

Are you saying that you had 1gb before and you bought an extra 1gb, thereby making it 2gb? Or did you have something smaller and then added the 1gb? For best performance, all of your ram modules should be the same (ie: not 512mb and 1gb, should be 1gb and 1gb or similar).

I quickly googled the specs of that lappy and found that it has a most crappy graphics card - only 64mb vram. This would explain why windows is only reporting 192mb, the rest is shared with the video card. Maxing out the ram will make a big difference.

Otherwise, you can go into the bios and change the AGP aperture size / AGP shared memory (or something like that - it will have a value in mb) and reduce it. Doing this might compromise video performance, however.

[junebug1701]

gday, ive added 1gig of RAM to my brothers toshiba satellite laptop. according to the manual it said you can add upto 2gig in the extra space it has, but all we could afford is 1gig.

as far as i can see, the PC is still pretty slow going, so i am guessing i gotta change some sort of setting in order to get the most of the extra ram.

anyone know what i should do, where ishould look to adjust the settings?

the laptop is a pentium 4 with winxp, ati mobility radeon 9000...

toshiba satellite a30

4 cpu 2.80ghz

912mhz 192mb ram.

For best performance, you need to populate both slots with the same memory. If you want 1 GB, you need a 512MB module in each slot. If you want 2GB (the limit of this model) you need a 1GB module in each slot.

For reference, (and great prices), check out this site:

http://www.kahlon.com

[JJCRU23R]

what i meant was that the ram in this pc didnt have much ram at all... but it did have space for an extra stick of ram so we bought 1 gig online (mind you this must have been well over a year ago) and added it to the existing ram in his laptop.

seriously... my brother and i dont use this laptop for much else except facebook, email, webchat and tocau. thats it! occasionally youtube.. but that pretty much sums it up. used to be able to play PKR but that wont even run for some reason.

Edited February 21, 2009 by J_J

[Jaaassseeee]

Jase, have you tried defragmenting your computer? Perhaps you have a lot of junk that need to be cleaned up/organised/compressed.

It might sound silly, but if your computer isn't organised no matter how much RAM or cache memory you have your computer would still have to go through many files to find what it is looking for.

Think of it as a giant library and your CPU is a librarian trying to find the correct information.

[ZippySkates]

gday, ive added 1gig of RAM to my brothers toshiba satellite laptop. according to the manual it said you can add upto 2gig in the extra space it has, but all we could afford is 1gig.

as far as i can see, the PC is still pretty slow going, so i am guessing i gotta change some sort of setting in order to get the most of the extra ram.

anyone know what i should do, where ishould look to adjust the settings?

the laptop is a pentium 4 with winxp, ati mobility radeon 9000...

toshiba satellite a30

4 cpu 2.80ghz

912mhz 192mb ram.

just throwing in any and all information i can find on this laptop.

any advice would be greatly appreciated.

jase

G Day. I'm new here, I just bought a ZRE Corolla and was looking around for any Sydney car clubs. Anyway, I have some IT Experience with hardware and maybe I can help.

Now you say here, you added a 1 gig stick of SODIMM RAM to your laptop computer and it is not registering with device manager or stated within My Computer properties? I'll start with the obligatory IT question of: Are you sure you inserted the stick of RAM correctly?(I know sounds like a stupid question). Maybe it wont hurt to double check? There are some cases where hardware can be added to a computer, works fine but does not display correctly register or display where it should. Maybe the manufacture of the hardware released a patch or driver that could solve this problem if its a manufacturers fault. in this case, try and find an earlier version of a GFX card benchmark program. Try it with the added 1 gig of ram and try it with it removed. If there is a performance difference then you know it may be working. On a side note, if the RAM is faulty it may actualy be slowing down your computer.

Another problem might be that the hardware is damaged. Quite possible that it got fried from a ESD (Electro Static Discharge) when you were handling it. A case of point: a 30 volt discharge is enough to fry most motherboard related hardwares and components. An ESD or a Static Shock (When you touch someone and you zap them) will gnerally have much more then 30 volts. A visible flash/zap of ESD can be upto 10,000 volts.

Theres also the possibility your motherboard cannot handle the RAMS speed and is therefore incompatible, thus eliminating the above - probably.

I seriouly advise not to mess around with the CMOS/BIOS setup unless you truly understand what you need to change. Google it and read very carefully if your going to attempt it.

Oh and if performance is an issue, dont forget to do the usual Defragmentation of your hard drive as was previously mentioned, and also check for viruses/spy ware. They have a tendancy to eat up system resources and is more noticable in lower end systems. While keeping it simple-stupid defragging helps your system find files by putting data in files in the correct order, instead of being spread out in different sectors of your hard drive.

Hope that gives you a bit of a heads up. Good luck with your problem :)