I’ve just bought a bargain Dell Desktop PC.
It comes with 2 memory slots.
Currently it has a Dell (Samsung) 4GB ram stick (PC3 1600Mhz) in one of the slots (other slot empty).

I’d like to upgrade.
I’m not quite sure about matching in pairs.

Shall I
1) Buy another 4GB matching from Dell at £41 (seems expensive) and run it with the existing one.
2) Buy a decent matched pair of new 4GB sticks to replace the current one (for £37)
3) Buy a decent 8GB single stick to replace current one (allowing me to easily upgrade later by adding another) (£39)
4) Buy a decent 8GB single stick to go with the current one (which would equal 12GB)(£39)

Cheers
Alex

4, whether matched pairs work better or not, an extra 4GB is what it is.

is it a 64 bit system? if not wont use more then 4 anyway

5) Leave it with 4GB as it is, cos it’s plenty? 🙂

What’s the PC doing?

vertical climber – Member

is it a 64 bit system? if not wont use more then 4 anyway
Yes, 64bit W8 Pro (probably install ClassicShell as soon as I start it up 🙂

I’m also going to go for an SSD for the boot drive (currently trying to work out whether 128GB is enough, but I doubt it).

woody2000 – Member

5) Leave it with 4GB as it is, cos it’s plenty?

What’s the PC doing?
Adobe Creative Cloud. I mainly live in Photoshop and Illustrator.
It’ll be doing some video work at some point too.

128GB will be enough, assuming you have a second disk for data storage?

Photos and videos soon eat up your space.

Go Here (Crucial Memory Scanner) and it will tell you what you have and what can put into your system.

xiphon – Member

128GB will be enough, assuming you have a second disk for data storage?

Photos and videos soon eat up your space.
Yes, 2TB in the computer and 2TB in a NAS.
My worry is that my current computer shows 108MB used for C:
I know I can reduce a bit of that by moving a couple of storage places out – My localhost is in there with about 10 WordPress installs – presumably I can move my WAMP install.

There’s also a few other bits and bobs (6GB of email) which I can move for example, but I’ll bet it would be at 90MB once finished. Difficult to know what this will look like in 3 years time (my usual upgrade cycle).
Edit, I also read that SSDs work more efficiently with plenty of room on them.

Provided the main OS is on the SSD, and “data” is on a mechanical drive, you’ll be fine.

Icon caches/meta data search indices are kept on C:

What about the RAM though 🙂

RAM is RAM,

Just buy another 4GB stick the right size and speed. No need to throw away a perfectly good 4GB DIMM to buy a “matched pair”

Photoshop loves RAM, so 6GB would probably be sufficient, perhaps 8GB – no more though

Don’t buy from Dell though – too expensive – use MrMemory.co.uk