Memory Upgrades

You may want to upgrade the memory on your computer, either the RAM to improve performance or the hard drive to increase storage capacity. 

First you need to find out what memory you currently have. To find this, hold down the Windows key and press the Pause key, or alternately you can go to the Start icon in the lower left of your screen (on Windows 10) then go to Settings > System > About.

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The installed RAM on this device is 8.00 GB. But before you look at upgrading your RAM you need to check if expansion is possible. To do that you need to check on the maximum physical space available.

To check this first hold down the Windows key and press R; type cmd into the search box and press OK. This opens the command line window.

Next type the following and press return: wmic memphysical get maxcapacity

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The number that appears is the maximum physical capacity of the computer in kilobytes. You can type or copy the number that appears and, using a calculator, divide by 1,000,000 to get the maximum capacity in gigabytes.

For this computer that would be 8388608 divided by 1,000,000 is 8.388 gigabytes, so this computer already has the maximum amount of RAM possible at 8 gigabytes.

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To find out the size of hard drive on your computer, go to the search window beside the Start icon and type msinfo32 and press Return. The window below will appear. Select the plus sign (+) beside Components to expand the menu, then do the same for Storage and select Disks. The line Size shows the hard drive capacity. So this computer has a 500gb hard drive. This could be upgraded to a 1 or 2Tb drive, but this would involve backing up all your files on the computer to another drive and then reinstalling Windows.

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