I have a dimension desktop 3000 - I bought the correct memory stick from Tiger.com - I got 1 gig. I had (2) 256 card in there. I am intending on shutting the machine down, taking the #1 slot 256 card out and putting the 1 gig in it’s place. Then turning the machine on.
Is that a no-no? Do I have to mess with the Bios? I hope not.
Is that all I have to do?
The reason for the extra memory is because I am running photoshop and illustrator on the machine, and I do not want it to be so slow…
I’m an amateur I know, be gentle if I’ve really screwed things up.
If it really is the correct type of stick for the machine, all you have to do is plug and go. I just upped the RAM in my laptop last week and that’s how it worked for me.
Some computers (in my experience mostly Dells) care very deeply about you using the same speed of memory - e.g. sticking a PC100 stick into a computer with existing PC133 might cause it to not see any memory at all - but most computers won’t have this problem. (And for all I know, DDR RAM has fixed this problem.)
In the operating system, you might want to change your Virtual Memory settings. For example, if you’re running Windows 2000 or XP, go to your Control Panel -> System. I tend to set my VM to be 3x my physical memory, but YMMV.
'Nother note: if you are noticing performance issues in Photoshop, consider getting a second hard drive to use as a scratch disk. (This, in addition to the extra memory.) When Photoshop uses the main system disk to store temporary files, things can slow down.
Without a lot more information than you’ve provided, there’s no way to be sure.
Try it. If it doesn’t work at all, re-install the old stuff and get back to us.
If it does appear to work, make sure it’s actually showing up as 1G. It should al least kinda sorta work.
I didn’t bother to mention any of that because he’s only going to have one stick. Without having to concern himself with matching ram, it’s really pretty much plug-and-pray. The main thing he’s going to have to worry about is the board not being able to access the full 1G.
I did the almost the same thing with my wife’s Dimension 3000 (except I used Crucial memory and the machine started with only one 256MB stick) and it was plug in, reboot, and go. The computer saw the entire capacity of both sticks.
If for some reason it doesn’t work from the get-go (some PCs have been known to dislike mismatched RAM sizes as well as speeds), try it with just the 1GB stick.
[Also, depending on the speeds of the 256MB and 1GB modules, you might be able to set a faster RAM speed in the BIOS if you use just the 1GB module, and 1GB of RAM run at a higher speed might give you better overall performance than 1.25GB of RAM at your current speed.]
