Upgrading PC RAM question

[stonedoggy]

Hi im currently torn between getting an new pc and upgrading my current one , I have a dell xps 420 with :vista 32 home premiem, 3g of ram and Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.3GHz,

I was thinking of upgrading to windows 7 64 bit and getting more ram maybe up to 8gb?, and perhaps a new internal hardrive currently i have 1 450gb hd and one 15gb i mainly use my pc for casual gaming for example World of warcraft or league of legends.

My question is if i was to buy a 4gb ram kit would i replace the current 2 ram sticks with it or would i leave them in and use the other two slots would this bring me up to 7 or is that silly does the memmory modules have to match. Sorry if this is a dumb question.(I assume the current ram setup is 2x1.5)

 

[DKRON]

You have to replace the Ram you have in your computer at the moment, they will not work together, also unless you buy windows 7 64x version you can only use 3.5g of the memory anyway so 8gig would be useless, also check out how many slots your motherboard has

 

[dmill89]

Your current setup is likely 2 X 1gb + 2 X 512mb. They don't make 1.5gb ram sticks. You could leave the 1 Gb sticks in and replace the 512mb sticks with 2gb sticks to get 6gb or replace all 4 current sticks with 2gb sticks to get 8gb. Given the age of your motherboard It is likely limited to 2gb sticks with an 8gb manimum memory.Of course If you upgrade your ram beyond 4GB you will need a 64-bit OS for it to be recognised.

The core 2 duo (conroe, 4mb cache) you currently have is still a very capable processor with performance similar to a sandy-bridge pentium dual core so you would have to go with an i5 or i7 to get much of an upgrade as far as the CPU is concerned.

As for hard disc unless you need more storage space or plan on installing an SSD there is not much performance to be gained from a new HDD.