Acer Extensa 2540-5140 Laptop RAM Upgrade

B

Blofeld72

Joined
13 Apr 2015
Messages
77
Reaction score
2
Country
United Kingdom
I have an Acer Extensa 2540-5140 (NX.EFHEK.010) laptop https://www.acer.com/datasheets/201...66.1088840024.1589927871-388060229.1589927871 and wish to upgrade the Ram to 16GB. It has 4GB atm and I know it can take 16GB so I was hoping I could just buy the upgraded ram off one of the usual suppliers but I can't find my exact model listed and when I use those compatibility check things they return no results. Is anybody able to a link to something compatible I can buy, I know they'll be about £100 or thereabouts, not bothered about the cheapest as long as its reasonable.
 
Make sure you're using a 64bit OS, otherwise anything over 4GB will be inaccessible.

Your laptop is running the DDR3L, L for low voltage, and won't be compatible with 1.5V sticks, so look for 1.35V DDR3.
 
Do you need 16Gb ram? 8gb is ample for day to day use. If you haven't already upgraded to an SSD that would be a much more worthwhile investment
 
The machine specs indicate that 16GB is supported, but the bottleneck is definitely the hard disk. As @flourescence said, an SSD drive would be a much better investment as it would increase performance. A quick google search indicates that a 500GB SSD drive is around £60. If you do both, your machine will fly!
 
Thanks guys, I've ordered the Crucial ram anyway. For me, today, this is the easiest solution to a bit more speed, upgrading the hard drive sounds a little more complicated than the ram which I know is (or should be) easy. As usual google has a wealth of tutorials etc to peruse so maybe I'll gem up on that next.
 
Blofeld72 said:
Thanks guys, I've ordered the Crucial ram anyway. For me, today, this is the easiest solution to a bit more speed, upgrading the hard drive sounds a little more complicated than the ram which I know is (or should be) easy. As usual google has a wealth of tutorials etc to peruse so maybe I'll gem up on that next.
Click to expand...
Ram is dead easy, a few screws and you're done. It is unlikely to make a huge difference to your experience. RAM shortages, where you need more than you have is fairly rare these days. There is a lot of cache management that means that if you don't have masses spare then it's not used.

Equally, even though the OS and apps will use spare RAM if it's available it doesn't often mean that you're going to see a big difference. (Unless you're doing batch image processing in Photoshop)

SSDs and HDDs are very different, there the change is huge, especially with a laptop. It's a similar challenge in terms of numbers of screws and changing the hardware but you will probably need to do a clean install of Windows. What you get for that effort is the biggest speed improvement you can get in terms of how it feels.
 
Thanks, I'll see if the RAM upgrade does enough and will opt for an SSD if not.
 
I strongly advise you do the SSD upgrade anyway. A 240/250gb SSD can be bought for <£30. We are not exaggerating when we say the difference between a traditional HDD and and SSD is night and day. Ram will make very little difference for general day to day usage.
 
A new SSD will also improve battery life but you will need to buy a caddy so that you can clone the old HHD before swapping them over
 
OK thanks again guys, I thought I would report back, I have installed my new RAM, the first time I turned it on there was no improvement whatsoever, in fact some things were definitely slower than before but having used it for a couple of hours and opened this or that at various times over the last day or so and done the odd restart it seems to have settled down and speeded up - is that normal?
I did some times before and after as follows:

Open from shutdown: before 40s, after 18s
Open web browser (Firefox) with the same 10 tabs open: before 17s, after 17s
Open file explorer: before 3.5s, after 3s
Open a doc file from explorer in WPS Writer: before 22s, after 7s

After it is up and running if I was to say shut down the browser or Adobe and then reopen it, it is almost instantaneous, whilst I did not measure the times for these actions before this is definitely a lot quicker now. Overall it just seems a lot quicker switching between programmers and having several apps open at once, before it was sluggish and generally a bit of a PITA but it seems a lot more user friendly now.

I'll look at upgrading to an SSD so will no doubt be posting back after some googling.
 
My laptop has near enough the same spec as yours (i5-7300u) although has 'only' 8gb ram, but has an SSD.

Average startup time of Firefox is about 4 seconds, sometimes a bit more sometimes a bit less.
File explorer is pretty much instant, maybe 1 second delay.
Boot time is not long at all, I haven't counted but is that quick I don't feel I need to!

Get an SSD
 
Seems nice and speedy right now thanks. Someone said the RAM wouldn't make any difference but it obviously did. I was forever staring out the window/twiddling my thumbs waiting for this or that to open or whatever, I don't do any of that now, like you the speed is no longer an issue. If it starts chugging I can look at doing the SSD.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top