Dell Inspiron M5030 - Help

I know my sig makes it seem like we're a Sager'd household, but sadly my Mom uses a Dell Inspiron M5030 from BestBuy <--- me.

Anyway, I was thinking of upgrading the RAM from 3GB DDR3-1333 to the max 8GB DDR3-1333. Here's the specs we're working with.

CPU: AMD P360 Dual-Core @ 2.3GHz
RAM: 3GB DDR3-1333
HDD: 320GB 5400rpm HDD
GPU: AMD Mobility Radeon 4250 (256MB DDR onboard, 32-bit)

Now that you've all seen what resides under this computer's "bonnet", let me give the reason why I want to upgrade the RAM. Nothing else can be upgraded easily (besides the HDD, and I don't know how to mirror... and HDD prices are through the roof), and I have a hunch that it will improve the performance of the computer enough so that she can look at 3-D virtual tours of houses that she's interested in moving to. Also, I think that with the GPU in question, it should give a nice little boost for gaming that my sisters can feel when playing shockwave games or flash games.

Does anyone on here have this computer, and if so, has anyone upgraded the RAM to any appreciable performance benefit?

Jason

 

I mean depends on your bottleneck. During her normal activities, open up Task Manager and see if you hit your max RAM. I upgraded my brother's M5030 to 8 GB DDR3 for like 40 dollars. You just remove 3 screws near the battery bay for the keyboard, get a flathead screwdriver and click the 3 tabs and the keyboard should come out and there is the RAM.

 

The bottleneck is just about everything. The HDD is small and slow (that, i'd LOVE to change when i'm home and everyone is away... dump in a 750GB 7200rpm one... maybe an XT ). And then the 8GB since I notice when I use it that opening firefox, Libreoffice 3.5.0 Beta2, and running a video produced by my T2i (at 480p) i can just about max it out. I'm also not a fan of asynchronous ram amounts since I think it slows down the computer a bit.

 

Welp, I went ahead with the upgrade. I needed a butter knife to remove the keyboard (a plastic scribe wouldn't do), and put in 8GB DDR3-1333. I figured that if I could upgrade the RAM, that the ability to run games and applications would improve. I was half-right. The computer boots up much more quickly, opens applications such as Firefox, LibreOffice, etc., with less hesitation, and doesn't touch the HDD at all, but in terms of gaming "prowess", let's see what happened.

3Dmark05: 3057 to 3090
3Dmark06: 1725 to 1701
3Dmark Vantage: P226 to P227

Thus, while daily use is much improved, gaming improvement, at least in benchmarks... is just about zero. . $40 experiment, but sorry... in an AMD-loaded machine, upgrading RAM will not yield any gaming performance improvements.

Jason