Old 512 MB RAM laptop incredibly slow on Windows 7 - how much will RAM upgrade likely help?

[NickH88]

I set up a very old Dell Inspiron 8500 as a second laptop. Since I'm using a new HDD and I can't find the Windows XP CD, I'm using Windows 7 instead. However, it is extremely slow. It can take over a minute on a web browser for a command (clicking a link, etc.) to be fully resolved. I do know that the minimum system requirement for Win7 as far as RAM goes is 1 GB, and I only have 512 MB. My laptop supports up to 2 GB RAM, but I'm skeptical of how helpful a RAM upgrade would be for 2 reasons:

1. I have the same type of lag in Ubuntu on that old laptop, and Ubuntu's minimum system requirement is only 512 MB.

2. I upgraded the RAM in another laptop years ago from 1 GB to 4 GB, and noticed no significant difference in speed.

Would a RAM upgrade likely solve my problem? If there's any other info you need about my computer, please let me know. I believe I can monitor the RAM usage via Ctrl + Alt + Del, right? I'd be happy to report the statistics on there if it would be helpful.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Upgrade from 512MB to 2GB will improve performance in win7 significantly.
What's the cpu model in that laptop?

 

[rhysiam]

I'm not sure how much money you want to invest into an old laptop like that.

512 is completely unusable. 2GB might be okay, as a bare minimum. The other problem you have is that when you run out of RAM your system will move things from RAM to the pagefile which is stored on the HDD. I suspect the old laptop HDD in that system is abysmally slow as well. So not only will you paging a fair bit, which kills performance at the best of times, you'll be paging to a snail of a drive.

Usually the best course of action with a laptop is check in some extra RAM and replace the HDD with an SSD. Doing those things will undoubtedly make a significant difference. At least in that case you're paging to an SSD which does a much better job, wouldn't be a stretch to say it's 100 times faster than an old, cheap laptop HDD under a random R+W (paging) workload.

The issue is that spending that money may only take the machine from completely unusable (as it is at present), to basically unusable... or usable but incredibly slow and frustrating. Will it be better... absolutely! Will it still be slow... absolutely! BUT, critically, will it be usable... I'm honestly not sure.

It depends how much money you're willing to throw at the old hardware. An SSD could definitely be re-used, and 2GB SODIMMs are $20 or so. If you really want to make use of the laptop it might be worth grabbing the RAM and SSD and seeing how you go. If it's still not usable, at least you can re-use the SSD, maybe grab a second hand (but newer than the one you have) laptop and chuck the SSD in that.

 

[NickH88]

Upgrade from 512MB to 2GB will improve performance in win7 significantly.
What's the cpu model in that laptop?

Pentium 4 - M CPU 2.40GHz.

I'm not sure how much money you want to invest into an old laptop like that.

512 is completely unusable. 2GB might be okay, as a bare minimum. The other problem you have is that when you run out of RAM your system will move things from RAM to the pagefile which is stored on the HDD. I suspect the old laptop HDD in that system is abysmally slow as well. So not only will you paging a fair bit, which kills performance at the best of times, you'll be paging to a snail of a drive.

Usually the best course of action with a laptop is check in some extra RAM and replace the HDD with an SSD. Doing those things will undoubtedly make a significant difference. At least in that case you're paging to an SSD which does a much better job, wouldn't be a stretch to say it's 100 times faster than an old, cheap laptop HDD under a random R+W (paging) workload.

The issue is that spending that money may only take the machine from completely unusable (as it is at present), to basically unusable... or usable but incredibly slow and frustrating. Will it be better... absolutely! Will it still be slow... absolutely! BUT, critically, will it be usable... I'm honestly not sure.

It depends how much money you're willing to throw at the old hardware. An SSD could definitely be re-used, and 2GB SODIMMs are $20 or so. If you really want to make use of the laptop it might be worth grabbing the RAM and SSD and seeing how you go. If it's still not usable, at least you can re-use the SSD, maybe grab a second hand (but newer than the one you have) laptop and chuck the SSD in that.

Thanks for your detailed reply. You are right; I don't want to spend much money on such an old laptop, which is why I bought a cheap ($13) 40GB HDD to put in it (I'm not going to need more space than that anyway). This laptop uses an IDE connection, and I'm not even sure if they make SSDs for IDE. I've seen 2GB DDR RAM for about $10, which I wouldn't mind buying if it would significantly improve my speed. As I said in my first post, I am skeptical about how much it would actually help. I never had these troubles with XP, though.

I like the computer, and I'd like for it to be usable - not as my main powerhouse of a laptop that edits video, etc. (I have another, much newer laptop that I use most of the time), but just something I can browse the Internet on without it taking an eternity to load pages. I'm not asking for blazing fast; I just want tolerable.

 

[rhysiam]

Wow... IDE, that's going back a while!

There's nothing much you can do other than chuck the 2GB RAM in there and seeing how it goes. Beyond that, there's really no further upgrade paths. So try it and see!