I have a 3 year old HP pavillion notebook running windows XP. I looked it up and it says I can go with 1g of ram max. I have 512 meg now. I need to buy a 512 200-pin sodmm DDR pc2700 memory.
I was wondering if it will be a easy thing to do? Is it just install chip and go or will I have to mess with anything like settings?
I want to just buy it turn off computer plug it in and go.
The reason I want more memory is it is slow to start up and my buddie said more memory will fix it. I have 80 GB on the hard drive. Also 512 and 512 equals more then 1 gig any problem there?

 

There should be a small cover plate on the bottom of the laptop where the memory goes.. Very easy to open it, and put another memory card in..
512+512=1024=1 gigabyte.. You should look before you order RAM as there could be 2, 256meg memory cards in it..

Go to HP.com and search for the manual for your computer.. They offer complete instructions on how to do most everything, including removing the entire case and display, if you needed to do that for some reason..

 

Ok thanks you are right there might be two cards in there. I never opened up the cover.
I am going to that site now thanks.

 

It should be just a drop it in and go, although first things first. Some laptops only have one slot for memory, some have 2, check which you have. If you have 2 slots, one of them unoccupied and the other with the 512 MB module, just get another 512 and drop it in. If however you only have one slot, you will have to buy a 1GB chip and replace it.

As for the 512 + 512 = more than one gig, yes and no, it's basically semantics. 1 GB of Ram is 1024 MB, so you will be alright.

So upgrade away : )

 

Understand that more memory will only help to a certain extent. A three year old computer likely has plenty of processes that start automatically at startup.

When you find that memory only helps a little bit, you should first consider a reinstall of the OS to eliminate all the programs you installed and have forgotten about, and all the programs that installed themselves when you weren't looking.