Memory and other upgrades for photo editing

Personally, I'm cheap.  I always use the free shipping options. 

Most of the time, both amazon and newegg have been stellar in their shipping times to me using the free options, and I avoid the temptation to use things like Amazon's priority shipping add-on, and the items usually arrive much sooner than the "expected delivery date" by sticking with the free shipping anyway.

IOW, I'm not sure they really do anything differently if you stick to the lowest cost shipping with them (for ground shipping anyway).

But, it sounds like you need it faster to buy software that's on sale through the end of the year, and want to make sure you can upgrade your memory to handle it.

You'll find multiple posts from others with your laptop model that say 1.5 volt 2x8GB sticks of 1333Mhz work fine with it (at least major brand sticks using 9-9-9-24 timing, as other timing options may not work, even if the speed is the same).

You'll also find some posts about some 1600Mhz sticks working with it, as long as you stick with higher latency memory (some of the CL11 sticks are reported to work, and I've also seen some CL10 sticks with odd timings reported to work (for example, 10-10-10-27 timing).

But, I'd stick to sticks that more Dell owners say work, as there is a negligble difference in performance between 1333Mhz sticks using CL9 latency versus 1600Mhz sticks using slower CL11 latency) for use with real world apps.

As long as you don't get a bad stick, you should be fine, and even if your apps don't need that much memory, the Operating System can use it for Disk Cache purposes, speeding up performance for frequently read programs and associated libraries on subsequent access to them since the last reboot, since they're more likely to be in the cache memory using RAM (which is dramatically faster than accessing the disk again to read the same program libraries).

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JimC
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