DELL M6400 Windows 7 64bit 12Gb RAM

I have just upgraded my DELL M6400 to 64bit & increased my RAM to 12Gb.
It has a NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M Graphics card

I am running CAD software on my Laptop and was hoping this would beef up the speed on it.
It was very slow especially when rendering. I was running Windows XP and had 2x2Gb
The problem I have is that the rendering is no quicker & when I look in the task manager it shows that it is only using 2.9Gb of RAM.
The system recognizes I have 12Gb of RAM.
How can I get it to run faster?
Did I waste my money?

Hi Bayside! Welcome to the Windows 7 Forums website!

Nice system, those Quadro cards are not cheap! I see it uses the Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 @ 2.53 GHz. 35 Watts Power Consumption.

Notebook computers are great for certain uses, but CAD rendering is not one of them in my opinion. Of course it can be done for that as you are using it for that, but on a comparison basis a desktop system will always do a faster job than a notebook. This is because a notebook is limited in power availability, processor speed, cooling, etc.

You might see if you can bump up the CPU's clock speed to maybe 2.8 - 3.0 GHz. Be careful though and I'm not sure if DELL allows you to do that in the BIOS, this is done by adjusting the CPU multiplier.

Regarding the 12 GB of RAM, in my opinion you have wasted your money to the tune of 6 GB worth of extra RAM. The nice thing is that you can always sell the RAM and get 80 - 90% of your money back.

Here is an excellent article from Tom's Hardware regarding how much RAM we really need. Do You Really Need More Than 6 GB Of RAM?