Computer Ram Upgrade Question (urgent)

[PrintingFools]

We had a computer go in for repairs. Before it was picked up by a mobile repair shop, we had already upgraded the RAM to its maximum 2GB. It had been running slow. The shop called and said the computer was ready. We asked what was done (what are we paying for) They said they upgraded the ram and re-installed the OS. I thought that was odd, because we already upgraded the ram....when I said that....they told me that they upgraded the MGHZ. Can someone please let me know if this is accurate and explain. I just want to make sure we are not getting scammed. As we are not computer techs.
THANKS YOU, in advance.....

[buckeye]

I'm surprised ANY repair shop would just go ahead and replace RAM without telling a customer beforehand. Reinstalling the operating system is one thing but upgrading RAM without authorization is another.... especially after you already upgraded. Do you know what was the speed of the RAM you upgraded? Check it to the speed of the RAM that they said they upgraded.

[Greg_Firestone]

Hi PrintingFools,

I'd tell them you want your old ram put back in it for many reasons. First, I agree with what Buckeye said. Second, the difference in performance you'll get may be insignificant for the price. RAM has different speed. For example, DDR2 PC2-5300 runs at 667MHz and and DDR2 PC2-6400 runs at 800MHz. However, these speeds are limited by speed of the bus on the motherboard. Normally you put in RAM that matches the speed of your motherboard. If your motherboard is only 667MHz, putting in 800MHz RAM doesn't help.

I don't know how much they charged for it, but I don't think the difference will be huge. It also depends on what you use the machine for. If you don't do anything crazy on it, you probably won't see a difference.

RAM is pretty cheap. When you upgraded before, did you upgrade it yourself or pay someone else to do it? If you did it yourself, there's no reason to pay them. They probably markup the price of the RAM and add installation costs.

Greg

[Shawn]

Diagnosing something like this is tough without more info about the machine and OS we're talking about. The best thing to do is to ask them to explain in non technical terms WHY they needed to upgrade the RAM to fix your problem.

I few reasons I can think of would be if the previous RAM you had installed was defective or was the wrong type for that machine. Although you can technically run some RAM types that are rated faster in certain machines, it's safer to have all the RAM in a machine be the correct type and speed for that machine. I've seen lots of weird errors get traced back to bad/incorrect RAM.

Another option would be to allow memory interleaving. On some machines if the RAM in matching banks is all the same size, type and speed it can be addressed differently to get you a modest speed increase. Usually it's not a very big speed gain, though. It would partly depend on what you were doing with the machine, if it only maxes out at 2GB I doubt that you'd see much of a boost by interleaving.

Shawn