PC Roger: Hi, this is PC Roger. What I'm here to talk about today is saving money by extending the life of an old computer. Here is the Dell Dimension 8200 that's been around for a little while, but it's a Pentium 4, 2.4 gigahertz, it's got an 80 gig hard drive and it really is capable with some pretty decent performance, but it's throttled by one problem, it doesn't have a lot of RAM. Back when this machine was manufactured, 256 megabytes of RAM was considered a lot and RAM was expensive, especially the RAM DOS type of memory that this machine uses. So what we're going to do today is install some memory that I picked up off of eBay that's going to triple the amount of memory this machine has, we are going to add 512 to this machine.
There is a couple of points I want to make first and anytime I really do anything with the machine, it's much more natural than even turning it off and even then, I want to backup the information that's on the machine. Make sure it's backed-up before touching it, before opening it, before doing anything. If your data is important, back it up. Don't make any assumptions about it being there when you turn the machine back on, if it turns on at all. Now with RAM DOS memory or RIM memory, there really any memory at all. There are different specifications and you want to make sure that everything goes with the machine.
Now in the case of this memory, they worked to many manufacturers and Samsung made a lot of it and so it's right on that what the speed and what the performance level of it is. I'm trying to get that in here and see if we can get it to show on the camera, but you can see it says, 800-40 and that's actually the performance specifications of this memory. If you go on eBay, you will see some various memory specs on there, might be 800-45, might be 1024 by something. It's really the best and sometimes actually mandatory to match things up absolutely.
So, you want to make sure that you take a look at the memory that's in the machine and try to match it exactly, if you are trying to add to the memory and even if you are replacing the memory that's in there, taking out completely, you still want to make sure that you're matching memory to the machine.
As you can see, this is kind of the clamshell style case the Dell has and here is our memory and there are actually four slots there, four sticks. Currently, the two on the left are the memory and the two on the right are just some kind of plugs that have to be there to provide continuity for the system channels. Everything has to go in pairs, so it's two on the left, only work because there are two there, you couldn't get by with just one. Some of the newer memory today and newer computers, you still want to put the memory in pairs for maximum performance even though it may not be required, Here you can see, I've taken out one pieces of memory and one of the continuity boards from each of the banks and again carefully in front of the camera that focuses.
You can see that this also is the 800-40 that was in there and that's what I am trying to match. This is what that continuity circuit board looks like, there are no memory chips on it but it does have to be in the machine if the memory banks are not filled. I want to going to do is I'm going to take the memory that's in here since this a little lower quantity, 256 versus 512 and actually move it to the second bank, not really necessary. If there were some machines years back or if you had faster or slower speed memory, you would have to put it in a different way in order to not have the machine actually try to perform at a higher level than the memory is capable. This is just kind of what I like to do, seems to work very well, not going to say it's requirement, but that's what I'll be doing. I'll be putting the 512 in the primary bank and the 256 in the second bank.
Here you can see the old memory and that bank on the right, those two sticks and the bank on the left, primary bank is empty. I noticed that it looks pretty clean and it really is not going to be too dirty in this case because both of those banks were populated with something even if not memory, so there wasn't any dirt able to get in there, but you're going to want to make sure your computer is clean and get any of the dirt out of there. I've got several video on cleaning, but you don't want to use a type of computer canned air, it's moisture-free, carefully blow out any dust or -- in there, so that you do get a good connection with the memory. Then as you can see, the memory is keyed, so -- in one direction and make sure that those not just in the right place and you just nicely snap it in.
There you can see those end caps, they are the actually locked in the memory on the side and those are straight up and down; one is down. You can tell that it's snapped in. Really, that's all there is to it. This machine now has three times the memory that it had before and it will perform pretty well for, if you know, may another year or another two years and we'll save the money of upgrading the machine because this looks perfectly good. That's it for this video. I hope it's helped you in someway. Please stop over my website pcroger.com, I've got a lot more information on computers and software, Windows tips and tricks, I've got a E-letter that you can sign up for that's free. Thanks for watching this video.
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