I want to upgrade my Dell 4100 with more memory (and eventually I’ll run out of hard drive space).
I have 256 of memory and 40GB with 14GB remaining.
Question is, how/where do I purchase the additional hardware?
Once I have it in hand, I can probably figure out how to install, but if not, that’s another thread.
Buy RAM from www.crucial.com. Good quality and they have a goof-proof website for picking our exactly what to order.
HDs can be bought almost anywhere. There’s Office Depot & similar, CompUSA & similar, www.cdw.com or similar.
HDs are such a commodity that you’ll find very little price difference for the exact same part.
Knowing what to buy isn’t too hard: just pick a size, and remember that the latest, fastest, biggest one is not the cheapest in cost per GB.
If you prefer real stores to web-buying, you can also get RAM at Office Depot, etc., or CompUSA too. I still suggest using Crucial’s website to learn exactly what type of RAM and what capacities your PC needs.
You’re right, neither of those items are hard to install.
The only gotcha would be if your PC only had one IDE controller and your HD was taking the master slot and the CD was taking the slave. If that’s the case, then you won’t be able to add an additional harddrive unless you also add an additional IDE controller. And being able to do that requires you have an open expansion slot.
Thanks LSL, Crucial.com IS a great site. I’m sure I’ll just go that route. . .
I have a Diminsion 4100 with (now) 512 MB RAM, two hard drives, a CD-burner, and a DVD player. The 4100’s IDE controller has two slots so you can have four IDE (ATAPI) drives contected without having to do any additional upgrading. Adding a second hard drive is easy: plug in and turn on PC. Same with adding memory. It’s the operating system that takes a little longer to set up a new hard drive (initialize drive, partition it, and then take a rather long time waiting for formating to finish on large drives).
Do note that drives larger than 127GB are probably not supported on your system. I’d suggest the Western Digital Special Edition 8MB cache series of drives, as these are fast, quiet, run cool, and are very reliable.