Debbie mom asked:
I have a Toshiba Satellite A1500 S2236 with Windows Vista Home Basic. Yes, basic. I’m broke. ANYWAYS, I love playing games online and stuff like Wizard101, and my husband has a flight simulator game, but everything runs painfully slowly. I know I need more memory, but is it a realistic option? I know zip drives are good for back-ups of files and stuff. Would I just get something like that? Or would I need to take it somewhere and get like a chip or something installed? Please politely dumb it down for me. 
Thanks y’all.
Memory like Ram or Memory like hard drive space? If you need more ram just google your model and make of your laptop and put specs, you will see what your laptop will handle and then go buy the ram. If your looking for more hard drive space get a usb external drive and put your videos , music, dvd’s on that and dont take up all the space on your hard drive.
they take sodimms small memory cards that fit in slots usually underneath, usually there are two slots and one is empty so if you buy the correct type of memory you can just slot it in, sometimes you have to buy a pair and take out the old memory, zip drives are obselete and are storage devices not memory
Crucial.com can show you how much and what kind of RAM you can use for your laptop.
The RAM slots are usually accessible on the underside of the laptop under a cover. Check the Toshiba website for instructions and illustrations. Usually you can just unplug the laptop, take the battery out, unscrew the RAM cover and install the stick of RAM, if there is an open slot.
Here’s the crucial.com page for a Toshiba Satellite A15 model. If yours is different then just use the Memory Advisor tool on the home page