I’m not going to lie to you. I was quite scared of upgrading the RAM on my Dell PC. I don’t do things like that to computers.
But in the end it was just fine, and what a difference! I am clearing the decks to give myself a good run of time to just edit photos – nothing else.
Why upgrade the memory on my PC?
My computer was slow. Lightroom was slow. Photoshop was slow. Everything was slow. I did a good tidy up of the files on my PC hard drive, and replaced the external hard drive that all my photos are on.
And Adobe came to the “speed up my workflow party” with the release of Lightroom Classic 7.3.
The final piece of the jigsaw, I thought, was to increase the amount of RAM from 8GB to 16GB.
I could have bought a new PC, but with that much RAM we are talking well over £1,000. I thought this was worth a go.
How much was the RAM?
£141.59 for 116GB RAM delivered from Crucial.
I went for the dearer option, paying the extra tenner!
And it arrived very quickly – quicker than I was prepared to fit it!
How did I know which RAM to buy?
On the Crucial website you download an app that scans your PC and tells you what RAM you need – very impressive.
It also told me what options there were for adding an SSD – that is one I will consider next month. As I said the other day, one computer hardware upgrade at a time.
I have to say I receveied excellent service from Crucial.
All I needed to do was install the memory.
How did it go?
I decided to go for it. I set aside a good amount of time one morning, made a cuppa and got the instructions from Crucial and Dell on my iPad.
All I had to do was this
- Remove the battery
- Ensure that the power was fully discharged
- Remove the back cover
- Touch the metal frame (to make sure there was no static)
- Remove the RAM
- Fit the new RAM
- Put the cover back on
- Refit the battery
- Turn the computer back on
- Wait and worry.
And it fired up just like before. To be honest at first I didnt see a difference, booting up is quite slow but I dont mind this.
I did however notive a huge difference once I started loading up programmes and doing work – so much quicker.
I fired up Lightroom and Photoshop, which were both much quicker.
Job done, and a needless worry out of the way!
I will report back on the performance of Lightroom next week once I have had a good go at editing my Santorini photos.
One last point – if I can do this you can – if your PC is running slow it is well worth tyring.