Adding RAM to an old EMachine

[Love Bug]

My sister gave me her 5 year old EMachine which runs Windows XP. It's pretty slow -- only 128mb of RAM -- and I'd like to add more RAM to extend it's life. I've found an online source for buying the memory and instructions. Does anyone here have any advice or tips for me regarding how much RAM I should buy and if this is someone the average user can do? I'm pretty good at installing software and hooking up stuff like printers, etc. Thanks much.

[Hokie]

1. It is easy if you are at all mechanically inclined

The sites that sell memory should have guides for doing it. Make sure you get the right kind of memory for the PC. Also, you will probably want to pull the old module(s) and put in larger ones since the PC will only have 2 or 4 slots. More is better on memory. 128 MB is very, very, minimum for Windows XP. If you go to 512 MB or even 1024 MB (1 GB) you will see nice improvement. With 128 MB Windows is constantly swapping things from a temporary folder on the hard drive and this REALLY hampers performance.

[whistler162]

2. The biggest advoce is...

make sure the RAM is certified for use with the eMachine.


IIRC... eMachine's like Compaq's and some Dell's can be very finicky about the RAM they use.

[CK_John]

3. Here is a good site for memory. Just click on your model and it let's you know the type

memory, and the number of slots and the max memory allowed for your machine.

I use them often and never had a problem.

memoryx:
<http://www.memoryx.net/ememseme.html>

[Love Bug]

4. Thanks, all!

Good advice!

[ChromeFoundry]

5. One thing to watch out for....

eMachines would often change the motherboards throughout their production of a single model. I had an eTower (a long time ago) that shipped with one of six different motherboards. Hopefully you can lookup the model number and serial number to determine the exact type of memory to purchase.

Many of the eMachines models have very low limits to the amount of memory you can install into them. I know this next statement may sound a bit frightening, but I'm going top throw it out there anyway... You may want to look into an operating system that will allow you to maximize your hardware to meet your end goal. If all you need is a PC to run a browser to surf the web and read email, XP is way overkill for your needs. You could easily run a flavor of Linux that will service all your needs and do it with way way less hardware. I just re-purposed a Neoware thin-client that had a 300Mhz processor with only 128M of ram. Running "Damn Small Linux (DSL)", the entire OS takes up 50Mb of space on an old USB thumbdrive. The performance is way faster than a 1Ghz P3 w/512M RAM trying to run XP... just a thought. DSL can be booted from a Live CD so that it can be tried on the PC without making any changes to your existing XP environment. Downloadable and free at - http://damnsmalllinux.org/

Hope this helps...