Dell Inspiron 9100 1GB or 2GB Upgrade?

I am looking to upgrade my Dell Inspiron 9100 from the standard 512mb to either 1GB or 2GB. The only thing stopping me is the $300 difference between 1GB and 2GB setup. =)

The 1GB upgrade in my old Inspiron 8500 made huge difference compared to the 512mb setup. I am just wondering if a 2GB setup would show that much more of an improvement.

Does any know how much performance difference it would be between the 1GB and 2GB setup? Has anyone actually benchmarked and compared the 2 different setups? If I had both sets of sticks in front of me I'd just run 3DMark and Sysmark, but alas I can't. =)

Current Setup:
Dell Inspiron 9100
P4 3.2 HT
WXUGA 1920x1200
512mb <-- has to go
256mb ATI Mobility Radeon 9800
Hitachi 7K60
DVD+R/CDRW

 

unless you're going to be running a database server on your laptop i really don't think 2GB is going to help with much of anything, you're certainly going to get diminishing returns after the first 1GB. I understand you might like the big number of 2GB and, I'll admit I'd love to quote my specs as being 2GB, but leave that for servers and your notebook will be fine with 1GB...upgrade the hard drive to 7200RPM for better performance with your $300 instead!

 

I agree, your money is better spent on a fast 7200 rpm drive. There will be no difference in benchmark results by going from 1GB to 2 GB of ram and in fact that 2nd GB of ram would never even get accessed unless your doing very very very large database stuff or your running about 36 memory intensive applications at the same time.

Jack

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" (Ben Franklin)
http://pbase.com/joneill

 

Thanks for the info!

I've already upgraded by hard drive to Hitachi's 7K60 7200rpm hard drive. That was the first thing to go. (See first post) =)

I guess next on my shopping list is 2 sticks of Corsair XMS 512MB PC3200.

Great forum guys!

 

What difference does upgrading your hard drive speed to do with anything? I mean it may be 30% faster when booting up your software but really I can wait the extra 2 seconds. And if your fileswapping with the harddrive while the program is running youre really underspec and going to suffer lag no matter what.

I'd say go with the 2GB but really its not a big deal as most stuff barely go over 500MB yet so 1GB is fine.

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by hammerz

 

Hi all,

I'm not sure I understand what the consensus is about upgrading to 2GB from 1GB.?. I currently have 1GB of memory I baught from crucial.com in my Inspiron 8500. I play a lot of videogames, one of which, a flight simulator, does not run as well as I would have hoped, especially since I upgraded my graphics card to the Radeon Mobility 9600 Pro Turbo 128 MB. So, like the thread-creator, I am wondering whether the performance increase (?) would be worth me spending the 500$ ?

It's not that the games don't run, they just don't run as smoothly as I like (granted the memory speed is only 266 and it is only a laptop). I already have a 7200 RPM external hard drive (and a 30 GB internal one from Dell, not sure which speed, probably 5400...). The game in question is installed on the external. I'll probably try installing it on the internal as well to check the difference, but I thought the extra RPM of the external would outweigh the transfer rate of the internal 5400 RPM one. (???)

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Brad

 

Just to throw out a related question to the one above. Is it relatively easy to replace the internal hard drive if you decide to upgrade later on?

 

Yeah, at least for Dells. You just unscrew the one screw holding the hard drive securely, and then slide it out. It's attached by pins at the other end I believe so it will take a slight pull to get it loose. You have to be somewhat careful though as bumps and static electricity can possibly damage the drive.

Brad