Guys, just formatted the father-in-laws pc, but its painfully slow running XP with only 256 mb, so need some more RAM.

The motherboard won't take the RAM I have spare in the draw as it only has one 'notch' out of the edge with the connectors. The RAM I need looks the same but is the type with two notches out of the bottom if that makes sense?

What do I need to buy?

Thanks, and apologies for my rather non tech explanation!

 

Easiest way to buy trouble free is to download CPU-Z, it's free and even tells you the chip manufacturer, memory speed and type/size/pin designation.

 

pull out the existing RAM stick and it should say what type of RAM it is.

At a wild guess I think its DDR RAM.

Also, I think Im right in saying you cant put a 256MB RAM stick beside a 128MB stick, they have to be the same size. Someone might confirm that for me.

 

No its fine to do that - you just wont get any dual channel functionality (if applicable)

 

You can mix and match DDR even DD400 with 333 or 266, but not in a dual channel setup, they need to be a matched pair

 

Yup - Worth noting though that if you mix two differing speed of memory, it will all work at the lowest speed - Eg, mix DDR266 with say DDR400 the DDR400 stick will work at the lower speed of DDR266.

 

and don';t leave the bios set to AUTO

 

Its ancient PC133!

 

<Sucks air through teeth in classic cars salesman fashion>

"That'll cost ya"