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To be specific in this case, Dell is charging you $130 to upgrade from 512MB to 1GB. On NewEgg, you can get 1GB with the same specs from quality manufacturers for less than $100 (Kingston ValueRAM, since that's been mentioned, for $105). That's well less than half price.

Dell themselves will sell you that 1GB of memory separately for $130. That's half price. Basically, that means that they're charging you $65 to plug the additional stick onto the motherboard.

If you want the least price and hassle, order that additional 512MB stick from Dell separately. That way you don't have to deal with reselling the other stick or another retailer. I don't know enough about DDR2 memory to tell you if having matched memory modules is better.


Hm. I believe that the 512 MB that comes with the Dell 9100 is 2 DIMMs. If I order another 512 MB, wouldn't that be 2 more DIMM chips? If I order 1 GB, I'd get 2 512 MB DIMMs, right?

So I could install 4 256 MB chips to make 1 GB, is that what you are suggesting? Is there any downside to having more chips?

Sorry, these are newbie questions, but it's been years since I worried about buying a new PC. Thusly, I need a new PC... :-)

- Jon