May 13, 2009 at 6:45 am
Luke L (5/13/2009)
I've always had decent luck with Dell laptops. they just seem to consistently beat out IBM And HP on price for the same hardware. My only recomendation is not to buy RAM from them. My last laptop I bought from them they wanted an extra $1000 to upgrade from 1 GB to 4 GB of RAM. I bought ram that was guaranteed to work from crucial.com for much like a 1/3 less. Granted this was 3 years ago when laptop RAM was a bit more expensive than today, but still look at this as an option.-Luke.
I bought a Dell around Christmas and the memory pricing was still out of whack with what you could get from crucial.
Jack Corbett
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May 13, 2009 at 6:57 am
I'm curious, is it difficult to pop more RAM into a laptop? I've never had one, only used desktops on which I've done upgrades on (more RAM, replacing power supply, video card, etc.) but I haven't opened up a laptop to see what's inside.
-- Kit
May 13, 2009 at 7:02 am
There is usually a small panel on the bottom which can be opened to access the RAM slot(s)
With the right size screw driver its as quick as swapping RAM on a desktop machine
May 13, 2009 at 7:04 am
IF you've upgraded the memory in a desktop it's much the same. Usually it's just a door on the bottom with a screw or two that you remove and the dimms are right underneath it.
One time, I have to remove the keyboard assembly to get to the second DIMM because they were placed on either side of the Mother board. Seemed a weird design but not all that hard to do.
I know that Dell has step by step manuals on how to do it for their machines on their support site. I'd imagine that the other manufacturers would as well...
-Luke.
May 13, 2009 at 7:15 am
Cool. Thanks. I've wanted one for a while. Glad to know you can do some upgrades to them without having to send it back to customer service.
-- Kit
May 13, 2009 at 7:21 am
Jack Corbett (5/13/2009)
Luke L (5/13/2009)
I've always had decent luck with Dell laptops. they just seem to consistently beat out IBM And HP on price for the same hardware. My only recomendation is not to buy RAM from them. My last laptop I bought from them they wanted an extra $1000 to upgrade from 1 GB to 4 GB of RAM. I bought ram that was guaranteed to work from crucial.com for much like a 1/3 less. Granted this was 3 years ago when laptop RAM was a bit more expensive than today, but still look at this as an option.-Luke.
I bought a Dell around Christmas and the memory pricing was still out of whack with what you could get from crucial.
I've only upgraded the memory in one laptop and it was pretty simple.
One thing to watch out for though. Many laptops used to come with 2 memory slots, both filled. So if you wanted to upgrade from 2 GB to 4 GB you'd have to buy 2 - 2 GB cards and get rid of the 2 - 1 GB cards that came with the laptop.
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May 13, 2009 at 7:22 am
Kit G (5/13/2009)
Cool. Thanks. I've wanted one for a while. Glad to know you can do some upgrades to them without having to send it back to customer service.
RAM, Hard drive, Optical drive and battery are about the only things you can upgrade on a laptop so make sure you carefully spec out everything else including the graphics adapter. Lots of laptops come with a very crappy "intel integrated" graphics card which is basically a software emulation of what a graphics card should be.
May 13, 2009 at 7:40 am
I'd also suggest you go 64bit at this point on your machines. Especially with VMs.
Upgrading memory is easy, as mentioned above.
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May 13, 2009 at 7:43 am
Jack Corbett (5/13/2009)
Luke L (5/13/2009)
I've always had decent luck with Dell laptops. they just seem to consistently beat out IBM And HP on price for the same hardware. My only recomendation is not to buy RAM from them. My last laptop I bought from them they wanted an extra $1000 to upgrade from 1 GB to 4 GB of RAM. I bought ram that was guaranteed to work from crucial.com for much like a 1/3 less. Granted this was 3 years ago when laptop RAM was a bit more expensive than today, but still look at this as an option.-Luke.
I bought a Dell around Christmas and the memory pricing was still out of whack with what you could get from crucial.
I lucked out last October. I bought an HP dv5 series that had dropped in price from $1200 to $700 (canadian). It was one of those lucky breaks, and the CPU inside was faster than the advertised one. I think HP ran out of CPU's for that run, so they put the faster one in to meet their quota.
Gaby
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May 13, 2009 at 8:11 am
Steve Jones - Editor (5/13/2009)
I'd also suggest you go 64bit at this point on your machines. Especially with VMs.
Agreed, and if you're going to be using VMs and SQL, get at least 2GB memory. 4GB if you can.
I was very happy with my HP Pavillion, except for the battery life (1h 30 - 2h). 17" screen, Vista 64 bit, 2 GB memory
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
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May 13, 2009 at 8:30 am
I tried Vista x64 on my new PC (no laptop) but the performance was awful.
Luckily my company gave me a Server 2008 x64 license. It's running perfect.
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May 13, 2009 at 8:44 am
I haven't tried Vista 64-bit, but on my ADM 64-bit desktop, I have XP32, and 2GB, and it's slow. I even have two SATA drives, OS on one, VMs on the other. Still slow.
I actually put in 4GB, but it isn't recognized (http://qa.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/steve_jones/archive/2009/05/11/where-s-my-2gb.aspx).
I have a new machine on order, 64-bit, and I'm going W2K8/Hyper-V as the main OS. Hoping for better performance 🙂
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May 13, 2009 at 9:10 am
A 32 bit desktop OS handles memory management differently than a server OS. However my Vista 32-bit machine with 4 GB of Ram reports 4GB even though it only can actually use 3.5GB (as is the max with a 32 bit Desktop OS). About a year or perhaps more ago, MS put out a patch to show the extra memory. Previous to the patch the OS would only show 3.5 GB 'cause that's all the OS could deal with. Now it still can only address the 3.5GB but it will at least show the entire 4 GB.
Steve if you're truly running a 6 Year old Mobo in that machine it may be the Mobo, perhaps you need a bios update to handle the rest of the memory?
-Luke.
May 13, 2009 at 9:16 am
I have a two year old HP laptop with a 17" display. Yes, I wish the battery lasted longer and it is a bit slow at times. It has 2GB RAM, and apparently is maxed out, as I wanted to upgrade it to 4GB.
Other than that, it has beed quite reliable.
May 13, 2009 at 9:26 am
Possible it needs an update, but this desktop, is (I believe) 3 or 4 years old. The 6 year old one doesn't have SATA, and I've given up on that one. I'll recycle or sell it to someone.
I'm going 64-bit only from this point on. Too many people have it working on their laptops, so I think it's worth trying.
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