The Dell development box is going well, and I'm actually surprised how well it has been performing so far. Considering it's quite a few years old, with just an Intel Core 2 Duo, it's doing a lot better than I thought it would. However, there's one area where it's struggling - memory. When I've got a few applications open or even several tabs open in Chrome (I regularly have 12+ open) then a lot of the time it slows to a crawl, since it's using a lot of virtual memory.

I decided to boost it's RAM (it only has 4GB) so I searched and found it needs DDR3 PC12800. Buying 8GB was going to be better value than 4GB and I thought it would definitely be enough then, so I ordered from a local supplier, umart.com.au in West Ryde. They're probably one of the cheapest computer parts retailers in Sydney from my experience - 8GB was only $96.

I picked up the RAM and came home and installed it, keeping the original 4GB in there also so I've got 12GB in total. The Dell now works a lot better, barely getting close to maxing out the memory and avoiding using virtual memory at all now.