I have searched the forums and googled a bit. But I haven't find a good answer concerning memory upgrade.

I have an Acer Aspire 3050 (AMD Sempron...ya, could have bought something better, but it was the cheapest a year ago...the day before vista is officially preinstalled on all laptops .....i know i can wipe out Vista and put XP, but i needed a laptop so badly for school)

Instead of selling it and add money to get a new laptop, i decided to get my laptop more ram (from 512 MB to 1.5 GB)

I have opened my memory bay and see that Acer has a generic Korean make pc4200 512 memory.

So, I have gone through loads of websites and online stores and concluded that 1GB 533MHz SODIMM is the best bet for my laptop. Since Crucial, Corsair and Kingston are at about the same price, i was determined to get:

Kingston KVR533D2S4/1G (a generic model)

But I used Kingston's memory finder for my laptop model and it returned:

KAC-MEME/1G (specifically for Acer)

i think i can answer this myself (generic will do), but i would still like to know if a generic will still perform the same as manufacture specific RAM.

Thanx

Hmmm. 2GB would be better, but if you're tight on cash, then 1GB is fine. Newegg.com has great deals, but I assume you've already gone there right?

ya...but with the shipping...i better get it at my local computer store....

and newegg doesn't really ship to Canada, or do they?.....even if they do, i have to pay the custom.....

thx for the advise though....

you should be looking at timings and cas latency way sooner than the GB amount.
dont buy shitty ram, spend the extra money for quality ram or you're gonna be wasting your cash.

1GB of quality high performance RAM is going to out perform 2GB of value ram any day of the week.

also your processor is a bottleneck for the rest of your machine so getting more ram probably isn't going to help it a ton, although in vista i wouldn't consider using it without 1GB of good ram.

hm......you are right...but i chose the memory according to specifications....

i even checked AMD's website, Sempron's memory controller does support PC4200.....on top of that, my motherboard supports upto 2GB 533mhz memory (chances are this is the manufacture suggested amount to not having any bottlenecking)....Kingston usually makes good memory, i read reviews and they don't seem to have any compatibility problem with this PC4200 ram.......so there shouldn't be any problem with my selection....

As for the timing and latency, i'll have to look more into it...thx for the advice though...

edit: i have been googling about "too much ram will slow system".....i doesn't seem to be the case 1. programs are ram happy 2. the mobo has a limit for the amount of ram anyways, nowadays mobo limits to 8GB.....the timing and latency is usually set to default, obviously you can always tweak it....

Ram timings, speed, etc depends on your use. If you're running a semperon, and you intend to run a lot of programs at once, then I would opt for 2GB, and not worry so much about the timings and specs, since the Processor sucks anyway. You only have to be concerned about things like CAS, timings, and bus speeds if you're a performance user. Performance user most of the time does not equal laptop user.

On my home computer, I'm running a Core 2 Duo E6600, with 2 gigs of Buffalo DDR2-800 ram with CAS 5. I previously ran 1 gig of GeiL CAS 4 ram, and didn't see much of a performance jump. For practical use, it doesn't really matter much. CAS latencies and other timings are only of concern for people who have nothing better to do than to get high benchmark scores.