4GB of RAM in your notebook for Longer Battery Life

[James]

Tom's has yet another review of memory density, this time in notebooks.

For the extremely inexpensive price nowadays, extra memory can actually increase your battery life, as it reduces swapping (waking up the hdd.)

Although the increase in battery runtime - 13 minutes when going to 4 GB - doesn’t look like a big deal in the context of seven hours of battery runtime, such an upgrade is still worth it. On the one hand, the cost for a 4 GB kit has dropped below $100, making such an upgrade extremely affordable. On the other hand, the memory upgrade will both increase battery runtime and your system responsiveness, as well as application performance when multiple programs are being executed. Finally, a memory upgrade often can be performed with little effort, as all parts of a notebook can usually be accessed easily.

[kent1146]

Agreed, but for most people, the jump from 2GB --> 4GB won't really improve battery life (unless you are running Vista). 4GB on a notebook seems like overkill.

[James]

Bump up to 4GB, and disable the swap file. (something they didn't do in the review.)

I'd be interested to see the power savings.

[ua549]

If you disable the swap file, Windows will create a temporary one for its own use.
You will also give up the BSOD memory dump file.

[fist]

Just add the 4G Ram and make a Virtual RAM Disk and move the page file there... make it as small as possible.

this is old school , lol strange Sharkies forgotten it.

in any PC allways more ram is welcomed .. the Issue in notebook was the lack of 4 slots and expensive RAM modules (2G) , well not anymore

[ua549]

I just upgraded my notebook's DDR2 667MHz ram from 2GB to 4GB at a cost of $75.
The old 1GB sticks are upgrading the cache in RAID controllers.

[Hammerstein]

I just upgraded my notebook's DDR2 667MHz ram from 2GB to 4GB at a cost of $75.
The old 1GB sticks are upgrading the cache in RAID controllers.

Nice.

I guess for anyone who reads this post it's always worth noting that a whole lot of mobile chipsets don't address beyond 2 GB. So, buyer beware!

[nukefault]

Such as which mobile chipsets? I'm looking at something based off the mobile 690G or Mobile 7000 series (AMD) and definitely want 4GB - are these safe choices?

[ua549]

Go to a memory website such as www.crucial.com and enter the brand and model of a notebook.
You'll get a response detailing the kind, speed and amount of memory that can be used.

[nukefault]

I'm familiar with the configurators, just not sure I trust them. Crucial says the 7000 and X1270 are both fine for 4GB and my current 6100 seems to read it just fine - so, for whatever it's worth I guess.

[kent1146]

For what it's worth, I'd trust config tools on a website like Crucial a lot more than I would trust a forum post from a forum user . Those guys are professionals, and do their research on the data in that tool.

[nukefault]

Theoretically, yeah. On the other hand, the mobo makers are professionals too and I have a pile of manuals from them that looks like they were written by a rabid baboon, copy edited by a lolcats addict, and then translated from klingon to elven to french (where the real mangling occured) and then back to english.

Alright, I'm exaggerating a bit and Crucial hasn't exhibited any major incompetence, linguistic, technical or otherwise in my experience... but you get the idea. Just because they're professionals doesn't mean they don't make oopsies every now and then.

As for trusting forums... if it's some random guy with 3 posts or his name happens to be "tbird1ghz" I'll probably take it with a grain of salt

On the other hand, I think the regulars are are for the most part 1. very unlikely to give bad info and 2. fairly likely to have specific experience in this area and know if places like Crucial do regular, careful updates or if their configurators just aren't that good yet.

[ua549]

They stand behind their assessment by guaranteeing that the recommended memory will work or they will take it back.