Easily Self-Upgrade RAM to Boost Netbook Performance

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Last Updated on May 2, 2011
Netbooks are designed to be a more portable and affordable alternative to regular sized notebooks, but that portability and affordability comes at a heavy cost in terms of performance. Coupled with Microsoft’s licensing requirement that netbooks installed with Windows 7 Starter or Windows XP Home editions should not ship with more than 1 GB of RAM limits the overall performance of netbooks in a variety of different tasks.
Note: Microsoft now allows machines with Atom N470/N475/N550 processors to be pre-installed with Windows 7 Home Premium without limiting to 1GM of RAM.
Upgrading the RAM in your netbook can be one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective performance boost you can give, allowing you to run the operating system better along with more applications at once. For less than $50 , you can buy a 2GB DDR2 SODIMM to replace the 1GB in your netbook — most have a single SODIMM slot, so you can’t just add another 1GB, and the basic Atom N270/N280/N450/N455 platform is limited to 2GB of RAM.
While it’s a relatively painless process to upgrade the RAM in most netbooks, it can be hard to figure out what type of RAM you need without first opening your netbook case and looking inside. As a guide new netbooks with the Atom N450 and N280 processors have a 667MHz front-side bus while the older netbooks with the N270 processor have a 533MHz FSB. Newer netbooks with Atom N455/475/550 processors have 1066MHz FSB if it is paired with DDR 3 memory.
Plugging a higher FSB memory module into a lower FSB machine will underclock it. For exampe, plugging a RAM with 667MHz FSB into an atom N270 netbook will underclock the RAM to 533MHz.
Lucky for you major memory module makers such as Crucial, Kingston, OCZ, Corsair, PNY Optima, Transcend and KomputerBay make memory modules that will fit just fine in just about any brand or model out there.

Consult the netbook’s manual to find out how much RAM it can support, the type of RAM it takes, and the number of slots or banks it has. There are many different types of memory, so be careful to note the exact type you need and cross reference this information if it isn’t coming directly from the manual.
The slots or banks are where you will install your new netbook RAM, but you might have to remove memory already present, so don’t count on being able to add to the RAM already there.

Ten Step Outline to Upgrade RAM

For this article, I’ve chosen to upgrade my Samsung NC10 netbook RAM from 1GB to 2GB.
While opening up a netbook to access and exchange parts might seem scary or even daunting, it’s really not that difficult. These days, most manufacturers design their netbook to make certain parts easily accessible for upgrade or repair. A point of caution though. Memory module chips can be damaged by static charge, so before installing or handling your new netbook RAM, ground yourself or wear a grounding wrist strap. Be careful to handle the sticks by their edges, without touching the gold pins at the bottom.