Upgrading PC for Windows 7?

This took me a long time to write so please be nice and answer anything if you can. Just answer what you know.



I have an HP pavilion Athlon AMD 2.16 GHz



I am going to buy 2 gb of ram because its only around $30-60. This is a work computer. The graphics and speed of gaming doesnt matter to me. I am probably going to just buy the cheapest RAM that will work for my computer and Windows 7



this is where I am looking for RAM



http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?u…



there are alot of numbers and letters that are confusing. are all RAMs 200 pins? Should I be concerned with the DDR2? Should I be concerned with the 667 MHz?



I also need to know the following:



1) how do I check to see if my motherboard has enough slots for a ram upgrade?



2) what do i do with the old ram? I would rather just leave it in the computer and not deal with taking it out if I can. If I don't have any extra slots then Im just going to throw the old RAM away and put the new RAM in its place.



3) how do I know which 2 gb ram is right for my pc



I went into my device manager but I couldnt find anything that said RAM. I have 900 MB ram right now



4) what is the RAM called in the Device Manager?



5) I could probably find out if my motherboard supports more RAM by looking at the device manager. How would I find this out?



6) How do I install the RAM?



7) my video card is a nvidia geforce 6150 LE. does this video card work? I dont know if it is directx9 compatable. is it?



is there anything else that I need to know about installing RAM? Anything that I am missing?



thank you so much for the help and if you want to direct me to any youtube videos that would be cool.|||Ok for ram your system will not work with DDR2 it will only work with DDR. your system needs DDR 184 pin. You can get this type of ram for relatively cheap nowadays. I'm guessing the model PC you have is a HP Pavilion a296n? if so the motherboard is only capable of holding a maximum of 2GB ram. To check the slots on your motherboard just open the case up which is relatively easy to do, more on that in a moment...



Keeping your old ram depends on whether you have two ram sticks in the computer or just one. If it's just 1GB ram then you can keep it and buy an extra 1GB stick to go with it making a total 2GB system ram. If however it's 2 x 512mb and you only have two slots on the motherboard then you'll need to replace them obviously. But then again your motherboard might have four slots for ram in which case you would buy another 2 x 512mb to go along with the other 512mb pair (hope that makes sense).



AFAIK you won't get much Information about your ram in device manager. I recommend downloading this program called CPUz here: http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.htm… It will give you all the information about your system including memory type and cpu and a lot of other stuff you never heard of. You can use this program to figure out the name of your motherboard and how much ram it can take and how much is installed etc....



To install ram just follow this guide here: http://pcmemoryfinder.com/how-to-install…



6150 LE is indeed dx9 compatible.