Member Avatar for stickdynasty

I have an Acer Aspire 5552 with 4 gigs of RAM and an AMD Athlon II P340 Dual-Core Processor 2.2 GHz. I was wondering if it is worth the money to upgrade my RAM from two 2 gigabyte sticks to two 4 gigabyte sticks. I don't know if the upgrade in RAM will make a difference that is large enough to feel or if I should just keep rolling with what I already have. Thanks everybody for your help.

~Stick

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Good quick-read for that builds on and ’s points: the Aspire 5552 is documented with two SO‑DIMM slots and an 8 GB maximum (two 4 GB sticks). The service information shows 204‑pin DDR3 SO‑DIMM support (1.5 V) and Kingston’s compatibility lookup also lists 8 GB as the usable maximum under a 64‑bit OS. (manualsdump.com)

A few practical decision checks that were not spelled out earlier: confirm the OS is 64‑bit (32‑bit Windows cannot use ~8 GB effectively) and measure memory pressure before buying. On Windows, Task Manager -> Performance -> Memory and Resource Monitor reveal in‑use vs available RAM and hard‑faults/sec (frequent hard faults = active paging). If memory is routinely near full and hard faults spike during typical use, extra RAM will help responsiveness; if RAM is mostly free but the system still feels slow, the storage subsystem is more likely the bottleneck. (ifixit.com)

Small but important caution: some Aspire 5552 units reported large “hardware reserved” regions after fitting 2×4 GB, apparently a BIOS/memory‑map issue; checking for an available BIOS update and testing one new module at a time is advised if the OS shows less usable RAM than expected. If the BIOS won’t free the reserved area, one 4 GB stick + one 2 GB stick may be a pragmatic fallback. (community.acer.com)

If an upgrade is chosen, buy matched DDR3 SO‑DIMMs (204‑pin, 1.5 V — the board will clock modules to the supported speed), install one module at a time to test, and run memtest or Windows Memory Diagnostic after installation. If the goal is general “snappiness” and the laptop still uses a spinning HDD, an SSD swap often produces a bigger, more noticeable improvement than RAM alone; combine both upgrades if the budget allows. (manualsdump.com)

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Member Avatar for Xlphos

Hello,

Have you got a 64 or a 32 bit operating system?
What do you use your laptop for?
Why are you after upgrading RAM?

Member Avatar for JorgeM

For x64 bit OS, upgrading RAM is generally a good idea, but how much depends on the applications you run. I also recommend everyone that is interested in spending money on upgrades to first take a look at secondary storage (hard drive). This is the slowest component on your PC. If you have a slow HDD and replace it with a faster, better performing one, you will most likely see a better peformance increase than by just upgrading RAM.

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