You might have visited the site today to get some inspiration for Christmas gifts and gadgets, and if so - good choice. However, if the person you are buying for is someone who (unlike you) is fully into technology and computers, it can be hard to find something they might actually want, and really benefit from, long term. Our suggestion? RAM! This we discovered after checking out the easy upgrade system from Crucial. Also, a RAM from Crucial was featured in PCGuide's list of best gaming RAM as the best budget RAM in 2019.
Although it might sound dull, getting a RAM upgrade to your computer or laptop can make a huge improvement to the overall running of the machine. You might buy a laptop without ever really considering the RAM capacity; too focused on the processor or hard drive size (or fancy design and colour!). However, a big ol' chunk of RAM will improve both speed and performance, and doing the upgrade yourself could save you a wad of cash.
But opening up a computer and fiddling about with the internals is not everyone's cup of tea, and that is totally understandable. Mess up, cause damage, or install the wrong thing and you might end up bricking your laptop. Not good. Also, even if you're okay with getting in there to locate the RAM, how do you know what you actually need, and what will be compatible with your system?
This is where Crucial invited us to try their downloadable system scanner; a free computer app that will scan your current RAM, tell you want you have, what the maximum is you can install, and which of their products is compatible.
The scans takes just a few seconds and will pop up with the results and info. For example, we knew that the laptop we tested it on had an installed RAM of 8GB, but we didn't know that it was in just one chip in one of two slots. Nor did we now that the machine could take a maximum of 16GB. So hey... lets upgrade to 16GB.
The list of compatible RAM chips (and also solid state drives - but that is potentially a review for another time, hint hint) is easy to flick through, and to pick with size you want. It is then a simple case of buying it and waiting for it to arrive, which took just a couple of days in the UK. And now, the installation.
If you've never upgraded RAM on a computer before, it can be pretty daunting. Fortunately YouTube exists to tell you how to both open it up, and find the RAM modules, on your particular machine. The whole job of installing the chips on our laptop took about five minutes with no problems, and after restarting the laptop everything ran far quicker and smoother.
You might not be able to notice if all you use you computer for is word processing and web browsing, but as we also edit videos for our YouTube channel, speed is important, and extra RAM makes all the difference.
So for a truly personal gift that will keep that special tech nerd you know happy for years to come, consider Crucial's RAM upgrades.
Visit uk.crucial.com
