Dell Inspiron 9400 Ram and Sound card questions.

I want to upgrade the ram and get an express sound card in my laptop.

For the sound card part I was going to install a sound card in the expresscard slot. The one from creative seems to be the only one out there so that is what I'll go with. I'm not sure if it will fit in my laptop. Can anyone offer some insight o n that?

For the ram, I've been looking around and there seems to be uncertainty on whether the laptop can support 3gb or not. One place, a guy said he installed 2 x 2gb sticks into his laptop with 64 bit and got 3.25gb out of it. That's about it for the argument that this laptop can take 3gb. Otherwise I've seen dell reps say 2gb is the max but nobody seems to know for sure.

Thanks.

 

Download cpu'z and go to the motherboard tab. Tell us what chipset your system uses.
Your laptop most likely supports 4gb of memory, but it will be limited to 3.2Gb or so when a 32bit operating system is used.
To be able to use all 4gb of memory you will need a 64 bit operating system.

K-TRON

 

I have a the same rig and here is what I know:

The 9400/E1705 comes with an express slot that the creative sound card should fit and work.

The ram can theoretically go higher (3.25gb) only if it's using a 64bit OS, otherwise, it only recognizes up to 2gb.

 

I had the creative x-fi, it's a good card, nice sound IMHO. Far better than the onboard sigmatel audio.

 

Even if you get a 64-bit OS, you still won't be able to 'see' all your memory since your laptop is using a 945 mobile chipset.

 

So skip the memory upgrade?

 

Anyone know?