Standard DRAM Memory

[dmbaker]

I'm running Windows 7 with only 2GB of memory (one in each slot).  I ran the scanner and my results are here:

http://www.crucial.com/systemscanner/viewscanbyid.aspx?id=BFEB9EA031D926C3

Since I'm running a 32bit system I'm assuming I can only upgrade to 4GB rather than the 8GB recommended from the scanner.  If I get the 8GB will it give me the most on my 32 bit system?  Also, I'd like to upgrade my hard drive and would like to get the most I can get out of it but I can't tell how much it would cost for the upgrade.  I've used 21% of the hard drive and if I'm understanding correctly, the ram upgrade alone isn't going to help that much.

Can you advise me on what the best option is for my system?  It's not even a year old and I get frustrated when it slows down.  I later learned that I need to clean out the junk files and defrag but this is my first computer so I'd like to do something that I can just set up automatically so I won't have that happen again.

Just in case it doesn't tell you on my link my computer is  HP - Compaq Presario CQ57 and CQ43 (AMD DDR3) Laptop/Notebook with 219GB of total storage.

A little off topic, I'm looking to purchase a flash drive and don't really care for the longer ones and risking damage by getting bend or whatever.  I was looking at the smaller ones and wonder how far they pertrude from the port.  I'm using one now with readyboost and don't really understand if its helpinng speed up my computer or allowing more room for temp files.  Any suggestions please?

Thanks

[Crucial_Junket]

Hi dmbaker,

As your system is a 32bit version the maximum amount of RAM your system will see and use is 3-3.5GB of RAM.  So you would unfortunately not benefit from upgrading to 8GB of RAM.

You have plenty of space left on your hard drive so the storage amount is fine and that won't be slowing your system down.  You do have a couple of options, increasing your RAM to 3GB would certainly help the performance of your system.

You could also look at replacing the hard drive in your system with an SSD drive which would certainly be a lot faster than your current hard drive.  You can have a look at the different SSD drives that are recommended for your system on the scan results.

With readyboost you generally only see a difference in performance if you have 1GB or less so you probably won't see any performance difference as you already have 2GB of memory installed.