Identifying And Purchasing RAM The Fast And Cheap Way

This will work on all laptops and any OEM desktop (as in a desktop built by a major manufacturer such as Dell, HP, Gateway, etc.), but for this article we’ll just concentrate on laptops.

Most laptops make it ridiculously easy to change out and upgrade the RAM. All that’s required to access the RAM is the removal one one flap on the bottom of the laptop held in by one or two standard Philips head screws.

The problem however is identifying the type of RAM you have. Many RAM chips in laptops state absolutely nothing on them save for the amount of memory is on the chip. It will not state how many pins or what type of chip it is.

The best and cheapest way to buy RAM is to use two web sites. The first one you use to identify the RAM type, the second is so you can get the RAM chip at a cheaper price.

For my example I’ll use a Dell Latitude D531. Very recently I was given one of these units to repair because it was reporting RAM errors on boot, meaning the chip had gone bad and needed replacement. This particular laptop has 1GB built-in that’s non-removable, and another 1GB that is removable – and that’s the one that went bad. What I needed was a 1GB replacement that was guaranteed to work.

The first site I visited to identify the RAM type was Crucial. On their home page is a "Memory Advisor" utility right on the web site, and filled it out as such:

Note before continuing: The "scan my system" option is hit-or-miss. I find that it doesn’t always work correctly, so I choose to manually fill out the information instead.

The result that came back was this:

Now I have some information to work with. The RAM needed is a 200-pin SODIMM, DDR2 PC2-5300.

The price listed was $49.99. This was a bit pricy and furthermore I needed a 1GB replacement and not 2GB.

Next I go to www.newegg.com.

I hover over Computer Hardware and click Memory:

Next I click Laptop Memory:

On the next page on the left sidebar, I scroll down and select 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM. I chose this because from the Crucial information I know I need a 200-pin DDR-2 chip:

On the next page, I choose the RAM speed, which is DDR2 PC2 5300:

On the next page, I go to the right and sort by lowest price:

At this point I have exactly the RAM chips I’m looking for, and the price is a whole lot less:

At this point I could simply click 1GB under Capacity on the left side as shown above to show only 1GB chips if I wanted, but when sorting by lowest price, the least-capacity chips usually show up first.

As you can see from the above, the price is sure a whole lot nicer than the $49.99 Crucial wanted to charge. I also know that all these chips will be an exact fit for the Latitude D531 and be 100% compatible to factory OEM specifications.