POSSIBLY the most pertinent question is: "HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU NEED MORE MEMORY?"

When you boot your PC, you usually see a display of memory which shows Conventional and Extended memory. The combination of extended, conventional, and upper memory usually will add up to the total number of memory you have installed on your PC.

Purchasing RAM.

Ask yourself the following questions, and record the answers on paper:

1. What type of memory can my PC accept?
   1. 30 pin SIMM, parity or nonparity?
   2. 72 pin SIMM, parity or nonparity?
   3. 168 pin DIMMs?

2. How much memory do I have?

3. What is the speed of DRAM memory my PC accepts (in nanosecond speed)?

4. Do I have open memory slots on my motherboard? (if not, you will probably have to get larger capacity SIMMs such as a 4MB SIMM rather than multiple 1 MB SIMMS.

5. How much memory will my PC accept? Am I "max'd out"? Some machines such as a EDS 386 only had 8 slots for SIMM chips, for a max of 32MB of memory.

6. Am I getting messages from applications (especially Windows applications) indicating there is not enough memory to run applications, save files, etc.?

7. Are your applications which run graphics, games, spreadsheets, etc. performing at a slow rate?

8. Is your harddrive light flashing when running programs and are not saving files?

Table: Courtesy of Kingston Technology Corporation.

Note that a 72 pin SIMM has 4 times the memory of a 30 pin SIMM. Also, note that if you have a "n x 8" 30 pin SIMM, it is a non-parity chip. A "n x 9" 30 pin SIMM is a parity chip. If you have a "n x 36" 72 pin SIMM, you have a parity chip. If you have a "n x 32" pin SIMM, it is a non-parity chip.

It is important to you to know this if you need to purchase memory. As a potential purchaser of memory, READ YOUR USER MANUAL to determine the type of memory you want to replace, or add to your PC.

RAM can come in many types, although main memory is most often DRAM chips on a SIMM chip.

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