SWMBO got one of those phone deals where you get a 'free' laptop. She got a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop which has a low-end Intel Celeron processor and a measly 1gb of ram, running windows vista.

Looking at the performance of the thing I did some very primitive investigation and found that - just for running the OS - the pc was using 80% of available RAM. Not good! And explained it's incredibly sluggish performance...

Soo.. quick fix for performance. I have ordered 2gb of extra RAM from Crucial (in a single 2gb stick) and have signed up on the Windows 7 free upgrade site from Dell. Windows 7 arrives tomorrow, the RAM arrives some time later in the week.

Obviously I will be completely wiping the machine of Vista...

Question:

Does it make any difference if I install Win 7 and then at a later date, the extra RAM... or vice versa. Common sense tells me installing the hardware *then* the OS is the best approach, but is there any particular reason why?

And - another point - I assume that 3gb RAM vs 1gb RAM and Win 7 vs Win Vista will be a *Big* performance increase? CPU usage on the machine is always below 50% so I guessed that is not the throttle point.

Edited 14 December, 200916 yr by yegnold

Windows 7 on it's own should be a good boost in the right direction. You can do it either way as far as the upgrade goes. I would do the OS first then the ram as you'll be able too see where your money has gone when you bung the three gig in.

Good point! Windows 7 and then RAM it is