Install on a laptop is pretty straight forward with most laptops, with the requirement only being removing the correct cover on the base and slotting the ram home. Put it this way (for those of you that would worry about doing this yourself) it’s easier to do on a laptop than a main pc.

Once in just replace the cover, turn on and almost immediately you will see the benefit as the laptop breezes through the logon and the loading of the task bar programs. Now we are booted up, let us get on with testing the product. For comparison I will give 512 results as well against the 1024 ones as just using the current 256 to compare against 1 gig would be like comparing a x1300 to a x1900 now wouldn’t it. OK, on to testing.

Test setup:

Benches used for testing are Sisoft Sandra 2005 pro Memory Bandwidth, Lavalys Everest Memory Benchmarks

Sandra 2005 pro Memory Bandwidth Results

Lavalys Everest results

Both tests proved the 1 gig set to be quite a leap in performance, but what I am more interested in is how many 4-5 mb photos I can load in Photoshop without the program becoming unstable while editing one of the pictures in layers. As I explained earlier with 256 of ram I could only open a couple before the program struggled to cope.

Well it passed with flying colors I was able to open 29 photos in Photoshop and still edit away with no program freezing from the lack of memory, the total size of all the 29 photos used was a whopping 165 megs, now when this laptop arrived here with its 256 mb it could only load 3 pictures before it struggled.

This benefit carried over to word as well as the 1 gig clearly opening and dealing with 130mb + documents with pictures with ease, it was basically the same with most of the apps on the laptop all had a massive improvement over the standard 256mb and even 512mb. Even the benchmarking software was loading faster.

Next Page: Conclusion