ram upgrade

  • Thread starter Thread starter philo 
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philo 

I have an XP machine on the bench with a bad HD.

Told the guy we might as well replace the drive...up the RAM to 8 gigs
and install Win7

The RAM is DDR2

Then I realized...
I can just replace the mobo with a mobo/cpu combination that takes
DDR3...get 8 gigs of Ram and only pay about $20 more.


No brainer.


Adding a 2TB drive he can get an almost entirely new machine for under $300


It still makes sense to build rather than buy new.


We looked on the Dell website and similar machines are $800 and up
and they are trying very hard to steer you into Win8

Not all combinations of Ram and HD size are avail unless you get Win8
 
philo said:
I have an XP machine on the bench with a bad HD.

Told the guy we might as well replace the drive...up the RAM to 8 gigs
and install Win7

The RAM is DDR2

Then I realized...
I can just replace the mobo with a mobo/cpu combination that takes
DDR3...get 8 gigs of Ram and only pay about $20 more.


No brainer.


Adding a 2TB drive he can get an almost entirely new machine for under $300


It still makes sense to build rather than buy new.


We looked on the Dell website and similar machines are $800 and up
and they are trying very hard to steer you into Win8

Not all combinations of Ram and HD size are avail unless you get Win8
Click to expand...

Well, yes and no.

Depending on the wealth of the patron, you could survey this person
about usage habits, whether they run Virtual Machines, do Photoshop
on billboard sized images. And figure out how much memory is
really needed.

Yes, I've got 8GB here, but I do run as many as three VMs at
a time, so I have an excuse :-)

The VM I have with Windows 7 in it, seems happy with 1GB or 2GB,
and 2GB is fine if it means not having to change anything. Even
4GB on Windows 7 x64 is going to be fine for most people, even
power users. My Win7 laptop has 3GB, and I can do a few things on it.
I've never been in a mad "pageout" situation with the laptop. I
guess I'm not adventurous enough.

*******

As for the economics, if I compare apples to apples, I'd
be hard pressed to get the same quantity discounts that
Dell gets. So unless Dell has upped their margins since
going private, they would generally beat me when the
same hardware components were used. Since you're doing an
upgrade, you're just buying mobo/CPU/RAM and that's bound
to make Dell look bad. The upgrade in my second best
computer was around $300, and I got to reuse hard drives,
optical drive, case, monitor, mouse/keyboard, PSU and so on.
So part of the Dell $800 figure, is for the "baggage" items.

Paul
 
On 03/10/2014 04:30 PM, Paul wrote:
***
As for the economics, if I compare apples to apples, I'd
be hard pressed to get the same quantity discounts that
Dell gets. So unless Dell has upped their margins since
going private, they would generally beat me when the
same hardware components were used. Since you're doing an
upgrade, you're just buying mobo/CPU/RAM and that's bound
to make Dell look bad. The upgrade in my second best
computer was around $300, and I got to reuse hard drives,
optical drive, case, monitor, mouse/keyboard, PSU and so on.
So part of the Dell $800 figure, is for the "baggage" items.

Paul
Click to expand...



The 8 gig RAM stick was $64


It's hard to even find smaller ones.

The person can easily afford it so what the heck, why not?
 
The 8 gig RAM stick was $64


It's hard to even find smaller ones.

The person can easily afford it so what the heck, why not?
Click to expand...

Wouldn't it be quicker with two 4Gig sticks, dual channel mode?
 
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