I bought a couple 2 gig cards for the office PC. Is there anything special I need to do to install it other than turning the machine off, pulling the other card out and sticking the new ones in?

Figured I'd ask before doing this, seeing how good I am at screwing up computers..... My PC is an HP Pavilion a1767c running Vista. It has 2 gigs, but it's a bit slow when running Lightroom.

Nah, that is all there is to it. I upgraded the ram on this computer and my old one that I sold to a friend within the last 6 months and both times went fine.

Make sure you push firmly (but gently) when placing the RAM chips into the slots so that you are sure they lock down into place (the little plastic clips on each side should lock down, and usually make a clicking noise.) sometimes they go in easy and sometimes you have to push a little harder.. but you shouldn't have to apply a whole lot of downward force.

Better to open the computer up on tile or something so that you don't have to worry about static from carpet frying something out inside the computer... but I usually just open it where it lies, carpet or no carpet and haven't had any problems.

Fair warning...Vista 32 bit has a maximum RAM capacity of 3 GB. It isn't a limitation on Vista, but rather a limitation on 32 bit operating systems.

Since you said you had 2 GB, I assume you're upgrading to 4GB or something like that.

To check your operating system type in less than three seconds,

- Press the windows key + E
- Click "System Properties" in the top bar
- Look under "System Type"...it will say whether it is 32 bit or 64 bit.

Well, kinda... He might see 3.5GB--32bit OSes see all the RAM in the system, including video RAM, up to 4 GB.

XP 32bit (just about any version of XP anyone has), 2000, 2003 32bit, 2008 32bit, and Windows 7 32bit also have this limitation.

Mdrew, the only thing that you would have to change is the memory timing/settings in the BIOS, assuming it's all new RAM. If you are adding more sticks that are identical to the ones already there, just throw them in.

It's 32 bit.

BIOS settings Cam? uh.... that's above my head. There is a 2 gig stick in the machine and I bought two more. I didn't know what brand the existing stick was, so I figured it would be best to buy two of the same.

Don't worry about the BIOS setting, these days they all default to "Auto" settings based off of a little chip on the RAM stick. Unless you went in and tweaked it; it will be fine.

Chris, what exactly does this "auto" setting do? I was just trying to help them get the most out of his RAM. I know my RAM timing is 4-4-4-12, but it is incorrectly set at 5-5-5-18.

I haven't had the time to change the settings for 4-4-4-12 timing.

Well it all went well. I pull up the properties and it tells me I have 4 gig's of memory now. Playing around with Lightroom a bit. The preview pains load faster.

Now I'm going to tear into my HP Media Server and upgrade its memory. This one could be a bit more difficult.....

Cam, there's a small chip on all DIMMs these days called the SPD (Serial Presence Device), it contains the timing information for that stick of RAM. When the BIOS is set to Auto it reads the SPD and sets the timing to what the chip specifies.

If you have a DIMM which you think should be clocked higher than your BIOS is setting it, it may be that the SPD is misprogrammed. That has been known to happen with cheaper memory manufacturers. In that case, if the RAM is actually stable at the higher clocking, one can go into the BIOS and bump the speed up manually. But a lot of times the cheaper RAM with the misprogrammed SPDs isn't stable at the stated speed (so it may be that the SPD isn't wrong after all).

The server upgrade went well too....

Thanks for the help fellas!

Getting into RAM timings is fun....

The best strategy is to increase the clock speed first, then get into tightening the RAM timings for best performance.