New Laptop Upgrades?

May 10, 2005 10:21 AM

Is it insane to want to buy upgrades for a new laptop?

I plan on purchasing an IBM Thinkpad R40E in the next few days. It has 256MB RAM and I was thinking about possibly buying some additional RAM and either installing it myself or getting a friend to install it. That same friend claims that it is absolutely ridiculous to want to buy such an upgrade for a *new* laptop. Am I totally off my rocker or should I just go ahead with the purchase?

Am I also insane for buying that particular model laptop?
Relevent specs are as follows:
ATI RADEON IGP 330M Graphics Card, 2.2GHZ Celeron Processor, & a 30GB hard drive.

I don't plan to use it for gaming and there's almost a 100.0 percent chance that I'm going to either be using Open Office or Microsoft Office & Photoshop fairly frequently.

If it makes any difference, I'm buying the laptop from overstock because of my limited student budget.

posted by tozturk to technology (10 comments total)

No, it's very, very reasonable to want to add RAM to a brand-new laptop. When I got my Thinkpad G40 I bought an extra 512 Mb of RAM within a week. It is very easy to install RAM on a ThinkPad—IBM even had a video on their support web site showing how to do it within the last year.

And it makes far more sense than paying IBM a ridiculous rate for extra RAM. Would your friend think it was nuts if you could save $150 by buying the laptop with 0 Mb RAM and installing it yourself?
posted by grouse at 10:25 AM on May 10, 2005

That machine with 512 or 768MB of RAM will fly for Office and Photoshop, so you should be pretty happy. The graphics suck for gaming, but as you don't plan to do that anyway, you're sitting pretty! And, no, it's not insane. In fact, it rarely invalidates the warranty to make such changes.. though do check.

Don't be cheap with the memory though. If you want cheap but good, go with Crucial. Don't get non-branded. It's usually a nightmare and only a few bucks less.
posted by wackybrit at 10:35 AM on May 10, 2005

256 megs is ridiculously small for today's applications. You want at least 512 megs, if not 1gb. Right now my computer has 318 megabytes alocated, if I only had 256 megs that would be, officialy, the suck.
posted by delmoi at 10:36 AM on May 10, 2005

Generally it's cheaper to buy the RAM installed, but that's probably not an option at Overstock. It's perfectly sensible to bulk up the RAM. If there's no vendor support, the price break should be steep. And make sure you check Overstock's returns policy. It's restrictive, which helps them lower prices, but it could be a nasty surprise.
posted by theora55 at 10:51 AM on May 10, 2005

One reason it makes sense to purchase RAM from the laptop manufacturer rather than from a third-party is so that you don't take up an additional slot, as laptops are usually severely limited in the number of memory slots they have. For example, if your laptop comes with two slots for memory, and the default configuration is a 256MB stick for one slot, it might make sense to upgrade to a single 512MB stick from the manufacturer, rather than purchasing another 256MB stick from a third party that takes up the only remaining free slot. But it sounds like that might not be an option for you in any case.
posted by EatenByAGrue at 11:24 AM on May 10, 2005

Do what's right- fill it out to the maximum amount of RAM it can handle. You wouldn't believe how fast your new computer can run when it's properly kitted up. 256mb of RAM is a handicap. I currrently run 1.5gb RAM in my Dell Precision M70- and with Photoshop and a browser open, I could use more.

As an aside, I'm always shocked when I see new systems with so little RAM- machines that could really be fast and wonderful and do lots of useful things, totally hobbled by too-little RAM. Furthermore, if it's using the disk for swap continuously, you are wearing your hard drive out faster than you need to.
posted by fake at 11:32 AM on May 10, 2005

As all have said, buying more RAM (especially from Crucial.com) is not at all unusual or illogical. The system looks fine for your needs, but you may keep an eye open for a larger hard drive. You may not need it, but then again, you may. I suppose that depends on what you plan on doing with Photoshop and your office suite.
posted by kc0dxh at 12:28 PM on May 10, 2005

As others have said, it is insane to stick with the 256 MB included in the system. I don't have less than a gig of RAM in either of my three laptops. My laser printer even has 192 MB of memory. I have a 256 MB CF card for my camera (apples and oranges, but...)

CDW is usually good about installing the RAM upgrades they sell, if you are buying the machine from them as well.
posted by b1tr0t at 9:24 PM on May 10, 2005

One more vote for more RAM. The main reason - you will kill your hard drive with only 256. It will swap itself to death. I've no idea why manufacturers still go so cheap on the RAM.

I would try to add at least 512 more. I'm typing this from a Thinkpad with 2 gigs of RAM, and I still feel like I could use more.
posted by bh at 10:41 PM on May 10, 2005

I'm typing this from a Thinkpad with 2 gigs of RAM, and I still feel like I could use more.

No offence, but WTF are you doing!? I'm now a Mac user, ex Windows user, but the base of Windows XP runs very comfortably without swap in 512 (assuming you have no apps open).. and then if you had, say, 1GB of memory, you have 512 for apps and fun.

If you're doing lots of 3D modelling, multi track audio recording, etc, yeah, I can see you using 2GB.. but this user is going to be using Office and Photoshop. Short of editing large 1200dpi images in Photoshop, I can't see any reason to ever need more than 1GB of memory for that, and even that might be overkill.
posted by wackybrit at 5:13 PM on May 11, 2005