Upgrading the laptop

Playing World of Warcraft on the laptop during my holidays ended in me being not happy about the laptop's speed any more. Now upgrading a laptop isn't as easy as upgrading a desktop PC, but it is possible. And analyzing where the problem was, I concluded that the reason that WoW lags on the laptop is probably the memory. I'm not a hardware expert, but if you press CTRL-ALT-DEL to get to the Windows Task Manager, and go to the Performance tab, you can see your "Commit Charge", the amount of memory needed, and your physical memory. If the Commit Charge peaks at over the amount of physical memory, Windows starts using virtual memory on the hard disk, and that is very slow.

So I decided to upgrade my laptop from 512 MB of RAM to 1 GB. There is a small computer shop not far from where I live, and I decided that I better let them do the upgrade. I've never changed memory in a laptop before, was too lazy to learn it, and didn't want to risk breaking something. That turned out rather well, because I would just have bought a 512 MB laptop memory stick and tried to put it in. But there are only two banks where you can put memory, and they were both occupied with a 256 MB RAM stick. To get to exactly 1 GB of RAM, I would have had to buy two 512 MB sticks and throw the two existing 256 MB sticks away. So the computer technician did something more intelligent, he ordered a 1 GB stick, and only replaced one of the 256 MB sticks with it. That was only minimally more expensive than two 512 MB sticks, and now I have 1.25 GB of RAM.

I tried it, and World of Warcraft is running a lot smoother with more RAM. Especially in cities, where my framerate previously would drop into the single digits, I can now play without lag. Laptop RAM is more expensive than desktop RAM, but the investment was well worth it. I still think about replacing the laptop with a faster model eventually, but I think now I can postpone that decision until next year.