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To give you a general idea of the performance gain you can expect from an upgrade, I will share with you my experience of upgrading my Compaq Presario V2000Z notebook from 256MB of memory to 1GB of Crucial PC3200 memory ($178.19 at the time this article was written). For all the following tests, the hard drive was freshly defragmented to minimize the drive's influence on performance.</p> <p align="center"><a href="atruereview/laptop_memory/screenshots/CPUZmem1gb.jpg"><img src="atruereview/laptop_memory/screenshots/CPUZmem1gbth.gif" alt="Notebook Memory Upgrade Made Easy (With Help From Crucial)" width="257" height="300" border="0"></a><br> <font size="-1">Click on image for larger picture</font></p> <p>Off the bat, I noticed that my Presario's boot time improved noticeably. The following chart shows the boot time improvements.</p> <p align="center"><a href="atruereview/laptop_memory/boottime.gif"><img src="atruereview/laptop_memory/boottimeth.gif" alt="Notebook Memory Upgrade Made Easy (With Help From Crucial)" width="353" height="192" border="0"></a><br> <font size="-1">Click on image for larger picture</font></p> <p>The first boot time refers to the time from when the power button is pushed to when the Desktop appears and the cursor is ready (no hourglass). The memory upgrade improved this time by about a dozen seconds. The second boot time refers to the time from when the power button is pushed to when the Desktop loads and the hard drive access light stops continually flashing indicating that everything has been loaded. As you can see, the memory upgrade improved this time substantially. With only 256MB of memory, my notebook took over two and a half minutes till that hard drive lights to stop flashing. After the memory upgrade, that time was reduced to a little over a minute.</p> <p>Also shown in the in the chart is the Hibernation times (going into and out of). The memory upgrade did not really improve the time it takes for the system to go into hibernation though it did improve the time it takes to recover from hibernation about over ten seconds.</p> <p>While a faster boot-up time is definitely a plus, the main improvement from a memory upgrade comes from the ability to load and run multiple applications fast and smoothly. The following is my informal benchmark to demonstrate this. First, I load MS Word 03. Then, with Word running, I load one by one Excel, Power Point, Internet Explorer, and finally Ulead PhotoImpact 8. The following are the results.</p> <p align="center"><a href="atruereview/laptop_memory/apptime.gif"><img src="atruereview/laptop_memory/apptimeth.gif" alt="Notebook Memory Upgrade Made Easy (With Help From Crucial)" width="351" height="192" border="0"></a><br> <font size="-1">Click on image for larger picture</font></p> <p align="left">The upgrade in memory shows a noticeable boost in speed when loading Power Point with Word and Excel already running. It also shows a slight but present boost in loading Internet Explorer while the three MS Office applications are already loaded. Finally, the memory upgrade made a substantial improvement in loading PhotoImpact (by almost ten seconds) with four applications running.</p> <p>Aside from being able to load multiple applications faster, moving from loaded app to app is substantially smoother. With five applications running and each one loaded with content, there was a noticeable (1-3 seconds) delay when switching between applications with 256MB of memory. After the memory upgrade, in the same situation, there was virtually no delay going from app to app.</p> <p><strong>Final Thoughts:</strong></p> <p> As you can see, upgrading a notebook's memory will indeed improve its performance, especially if you plan on running multiple applications at the same time. With that said, do you really need to upgrade? The answer to that heavily depends on how satisfied you are with the current performance of your system. If you are currently unsatisfied with you notebook's performance then a boost in memory capacity will definitely perk your system right up. However, if you are currently satisfied with your current system's performance and do not plan on doing anything new with it, then you should hold off on an upgrade until you feel the need for improvement. Keep in mind though; you will never grasp how sluggish your system really is until you have used a faster system.</p> <p>I would like to thank <a href="http://www.crucial.com">Crucial</a> for providing the sample memory module used in this article.</p> <p><a href="atruereview/laptop_memory/install_memory.php"></a> <a href="laptop_memory/install_memory.php">Previous (Installation & Where to Buy)</a></p> </div> </td> </tr> </table> </div> <div id="footer" class="clr"> <div class="rk-1"> <div class="rk-2"> <div id="the-footer"> <script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <script type="text/javascript"> try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-6922792-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}</script>  </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </body> </html>