So my friend told me Best Buy has some sale (ending today) on 1 gig of Kingston RAM for $28.

I have 512 MB of RAM.

If I go buy 1 gig, can I just toss it in and have 1.5 gigs, or do I need to replace the 0.5 gigs and only have 1.0 gigs?

And is there anything else I need to be worried about?

I'm a total nub when it comes to hardware.

My computer was bought in the store in December 2004 for Christmas, and it's a Gateway 550GR, Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.20GHz, 512 MB RAM, 200 GB hard disk.  My dad blew a grand on that in 2004, instead of letting me get a friend to help me build one.

Would upgrading my RAM at this point even be worth it, or should I just wait until I can save up some money and build a new one, and keep my old hard drive or something?

I would suggest buying 2 gigs if that's the price they are going for, but if you don't the RAM should be compatible so long as they are the same type and same frequency (which i think is important, i' have never mixed and matched RAM so not sure).

To play it safe i would buy 2 gigs of the same type and get rid of the 512.

The thing that I'm worry about and not too sure about is what if your old RAM runs at 667MHz and your new RAM runs at 800MHz or at some other conflicting speed? Never tried that out to see.

It's worth upgrading I'd say (others may disagree)

Does it have a videocard or is it integrated graphics?

If it does not have a video card, check if it has an AGP slot, or even a PCI-Express slot

You're going to want to get a new video card, along with the RAM

(We'll talk about videocards later once we know if you have AGP or PCI-Express)

The processor isn't that bad for being 4 years old



As for the RAM, you're going to need to look inside (or find the documentation) to see if there is an open slot for your new RAM stick. If there's only two RAM slots, and there are two sticks of 256 mb of RAM in each one, then you will have to take one out. But if, for example, there's two slots, and one stick of 512 mb, then your all set.

Make sure the RAM you're buying is the right kind for your motherboard too...

Well from 2004 it's probably DDR ram, so once the kingston is DDR it should be ok. There are very limited computers that were made around that time that wouldn't support different brands/size/frequency memory, but I would say it's probably safe. If you want to be totally safe though, just do what ^^^ph4nt said. That computer should be able to hold 2 gigs of ram.

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php Download that and tell us what type of ram it says you have. Then we could go from there.

the computer itself isn't that bad for a 4 year old, I would say it's definitely NOT obsolete. It depends on what u want to do in the future with the PC. if you don't really bother with games on the PC, then the upgrade in RAM would be acceptable. If it's games, well you might need an overall depending on some other factors with your computer, like video card, card slot types, multi-core support etc.

Yeah it's DDR RAM.

And uh, it says the processor has 800 MHz FSB, 1 MB L2 cache.

The video card is an ATI Radeon X300 SE with 128 MB PCI-Express Graphics.



How do I find out what kind of motherboard I have?

Well if Best Buy has DDR ram I guess go with them, otherwise here iis some on newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2000170147%201052107965&bop=And&Order=PRICE. Also check to see how fast your current ram is. Oh and if you want to game I recommend a new video card. Your CPU is 'just enough' for now, but it will soon be dated.

Two things that haven't come out yet is, that when you have RAM on two different kind of sticks, your computer does two things:
1. The speed of the RAM is defined by the slower (for example you'd have 100 and 200MHz RAM:s, the speed is always 100MHz).
2. Usually the size is defined by the smaller, ie it reads both the same size (for example 512MB and 1GB would be 2x512).

Btw, i thought you had been drinking last night and now your access to your memory is quite random.