Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Adding Additional Memory to a Laptop PC

Is that fairly easy, if anyone knows?

If so, I likely would have someone else like the Geek Squad do it.

I need to double my memory from 500GB to 1TB for work reasons.

It’s a fairly-new Dell with a 16GB RAM processor.

Any advice is appreciated.

The Dell support web site has articles which usually include pictures for what you want to do. Depends on your model how easy it is. Also depend on whether your hard drive is a disk or NVME memory. A disk on the Dells is usually a matter of unscrewing a hatch on the side and replacing the disk in the enclosure caddy. If it's NVME, that might be on the motherboard and you're out of luck swapping it. RAM memory might be under the keyboard, in which case you gotta unscrew like 20 things and get under there with a precision sized screwdriver. Search for "replace RAM (or hard drive) model ____" on their support site.

Thanks Jake.

The RAM number is your memory, the 500GB number is your hard drive.

Which is it that you want to double?

Jake gave the basic requirements, but if it's RAM that you want to replace, you will need to know how many slots you have & how much the model that you have can be upgraded to.

MM

Actually, if you want to increase storage space, the easiest thing is just get an external plug-in hard drive.

MM

I want to increase my hard drive from 500GB to 1TB. I have two small plug-in hard drives, but I do not want to have to use those all the time.

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Jeebus man, that's confusing.

To the OP...
Sounds like you want to increase your hard drive capacity. Memory (RAM) is a different thing.
You'll have to copy your Operating System and your files, apps to your new hard drive.
It's not a simple, turn-key process unless you have some hardware and software experience.
Without some skill in those areas, it will be best to take it to a qualified tech.

Another way to increase storage is to use an external hard drive or thumb drives.
Talk to your tech about it, these may or may not fit your application.

Thanks.

You can buy a single 1TB external drive & only use it for the specific (large) data when you need to save it.

Unless you are constantly doing high demand graphics & saving it on an ongoing hourly basis, you shouldn't nèd it all the time.

MM

If you're thinking of upgrading your RAM check to make sure yours is not soldered in. Sometimes it is on laptops (like mine).

My firm has a shared drive that mirrors onto my hard drive. I don't think I can make that work on my external drives. It's now 220GB and growing. That only leaves me with about 250GB on my HD. I need more than that, and do not want to have to plug in an external drive all the time.

So you need to increase your data storage. My advice is not to double it but to quadruple it. Disk drives are relatively cheap so increasing to 2TB wouldn't cost that much more. Just make sure your operating system will address 2TB (most should). Having a Pro do it is very reasonable.

Depending on the model, there may be a second disk bay on it. If so, you can potentially add a second drive. That may seem no different than have a second external drive, but it is. If you installed a second internal drive, the file system will likely allow you to span the partition across both and they act like one larger disk.

Thanks for the advice, gentlemen.

Just a comment about Best Buy/Geek Squad. They are VERY overpriced and they WILL add malware/bloatware you didn't ask for and don't want.

Swapping the HD is simple. Buy the drive you want and order one cable @~10 bucks, plug it into the usb and clone your existing HD.

On a related subject- - - -I just bought a Chrome Book laptop to replace the moldy antique I've been using for close to 10 years. ( Windows 8.1) Is there any way short of an act of congress to transfer files, programs, photos, etc. from the old one to the new addition? The old thing is literally falling apart- - - -case duct taped together in places where it's been dropped and damaged.

It is literally like one screw to access the chips..

Just like cloning except you pick individual files, photos etc. off the old drive, programs present a challenge as a lot of Win 8.1 won’t run reliably on Win10-11 to far back for compatibility. If you want to try, be sure to get all the hidden files associated with the exe.

Chromebooks have very limited disk storage. They're designed to be online only, in effect. Everything is stored in the cloud, including your software.

I'm typing this on a Gateway "Windows student" machine that was intended to compete with chromebooks. $150 and it has 4 gB of RAM and only 64gB of hard drive space. However, it also has a slot fr a mini-SD card which serves as a hard drive of sorts for storage. I immediately wiped the Windows and made it into a Linux machine running Zorin Core, of course. Zorin runs on less than 1.5 gB of RAM and it and all my software take up less than 13 gB of hard drive space.

It is possible to convert some Chromebooks to Linux, but not all. And it isn't nearly as easy as converting Windows machines, which is why I bought this little plastic fantastic job.