Every computer to ship in 2012 – be it a brand new notebook computer or even one of the new and lighter ultrabooks to arrive from various manufacturers this year ship with one glaring flaw and that's too little RAM installed.

This is usually due to the cost cutting required as computers, especially notebooks are constricted in the cost of the parts and the room for those parts to go. So with that in mind, the computer manufacturers tend to ship the computers with just enough memory for the computers to boot up and sometimes some light tasks tasks such as word processing or facebook. On some of the newer ultrabooks the RAM is soldered directly to the motherboard with no chance of adding more memory later. But for the rest of us .. ram is cheap.

Most notebook computers today allow at minimum of 8GB of RAM and some of the more higher end notebooks ship from the factory with 8GB and allow for 16GB of notebook RAM to be installed.

Because the 16GB memory upgrade kits are still a bit on the expensive side, your best value for a notebook memory upgrade is the 8GB memory upgrade kit. It does not really matter where you buy your RAM, but you should be aware that the PC manufacturers will charge you more for a memory upgrade than you can buy ram online elsewhere. Current street prices for an 8GB memory kit hover around the $ 40 dollar mark, which means that for less than the cost of dinner for two you can max out the memory on your computer.

Reasons for a RAM upgrade are speed first of all and general performance improvements overall with more memory installed in you computer. This advice holds true for all popular and best selling computers from Acer, Apple, Dell, Sony and Toshiba just to name a few.

The best part of upgrading ram on modern computers is that with a bit of patience and care and common household tools you can perform the upgrade yourself and save the cost of an expensive computer repair bill that could have priced more than the ram upgrade itself. Add to the fact, and this holds especially true for notebook computers in most instances you will be replacing the memory upgrade with larger ram upgrades and you will have the original memory upgrade to either sell or donate.

To summarize, the 8GB memory upgrade kit is the cheapest method to increase the performance of your computer in 2012.