Upgrading memory on a laptop

In the past two weeks I've upgraded three laptops -

The first was a Packard Bell Easynote C series. It came with 192mb build in memory - and blimey it was sluggish - it's a fair few years old now and it was tired - But for the sake of £15 - yeah £15 I managed to save the bugger.

Slammed in a 512mb memory module and bobs yer aunties favourite cousin.

It was really easy n all. I'd always been wary of upgrading laptops - this was my first attempt and gotta say it was really straight forward.

Here's a link to Packard Bell's tutorial on installing the memory. Click This!

The 192mb was already soldered in - there is a spare slot for a 512mb chip.

Memory I used was a generic 512mb PC266 (PC2100 / DDR-266) DDR SDRAM 200-pin SO-DIMM.

When I was looking around the internet for advice on wether it was worth the upgrade I came across 1 or 2 articles/forum posts stating it isn't.

Well the change was instant and now 2 weeks later I can tell you it was worth it, it's faster and smoother - the difference is massive - so before you ditch it spend the £15 and do it.

The second laptop - to get a make over was my Dell Inspiron 1520 - it is the Celeron M Model with 1gb installed - Two Dimms of 512mb.

Bit more difficult this one as one of the memory slots is under the keyboard -

Video tutorial on you tube -


Now here's the thing, initially I bought two sticks of 2gb memory - to give me a combined memory of 4gb - I installed them as directed - and powered up the laptop.

Things went weird, or so I thought - POSSIBLE TANGENT WARNING -

Not sure if this happened because of the memory or was just a coinkidink but I suddenly had a really slow laptop - the hard drive was almost choking and when I played audio it was stuttering.

Anyway follow this link to another article I wrote on my website before hand just in case.

Anyway before I fixed the problem I removed one of the sticks and replaced it with the 512mb stick I'd removed before - this was from the slot on the back of the laptop(I had no desire to remove the keyboard again).

So now I have a laptop with 2.5 gb and after fixing the IDE driver problem in above article everything worked a treat.

So me thinks If that works could I slam the extra 2gb stick in my other laptop?

No harm no fowl sez me.

So Off I go, grab the Compaq - full name Presario C500EA Notebook PC - celeron chip.

The memory slots are on the back of the laptop - uses the same memory I had already bought.

Installed it - restarted and it's excellent - Note that the first two laptops have XP installed the compaq has vista.