Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from Adrien: I have a three year old custom-built desktop computer that’s in need of some upgrades.
I plan to replace the motherboard in a year or so but right now I can only afford to add an SSD and (hopefully) max out the RAM.
I know which SSD I need to buy but I’m not sure how much RAM I can add.
Can you tell me how much RAM can be installed on a 3 year old Gigabyte motherboard? [Read more…]
Click here to sign up for my free Daily Tech Tips Newsletter and you’ll never miss a tip!
Question from Pete: I have a Dell desktop computer that came with 8GB of RAM and Windows 7. I have since upgraded it to Windows 10.
Per your recommendation I went to Crucial.com and ran their System Scanner on this machine and it says it can use up to 16GB of RAM.
I know that adding more RAM to a computer makes it run faster. My question is would doubling the amount of RAM in this particular computer to 16GB make it run a LOT faster?
Question from Calvin: I have two 8GB DDR4 RAM sticks in my computer. They are identical to one another in every way (I bought them a while back as a 16GB kit).
When I log into the BIOS it says one stick is running at 2400Mhz and the other one is running at 2133Mhz.
I’ve always heard that all the RAM sticks in a PC should operate at the same speed or your system might crash.
Question from Benji P.: Rick, I took my eight year old HP laptop to Best Buy over the weekend to have them upgrade the RAM for me.
This machine only has 4GB and I want to bump it up to 8GB. I know it can use 8GB because I looked it up.
After some back and forth the guy told me I shouldn’t waste my money upgrading a machine that was that old and proceeded to try to sell me a new computer. I don’t want a new laptop. I like this one!
My question is do you know of a place in the Raleigh, NC area that will upgrade the memory for me? Or is this something that I can possibly do myself?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Mac G.: I have a four year old Acer laptop that recently started crashing to blue screens at random times.
A first it would only happen about once or twice a month but now they’re popping up at least once a day.
I thought it might be a software issue so I followed your instructions for resetting Windows 10 but that didn’t help. The blue screens continued popping up even with no programs installed.
My next thought is maybe my computer has a RAM chip that went bad.
First of all, what are your thoughts about the possibility of bad RAM being the problem?
And second, if you do suspect a RAM problem how’s the best way to check the RAM to see if it’s in fact bad?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]