Acer Aspire 5680 - Upgrading advice needed

I own an Aspire 5680, 3-odd years old, still a very reliable laptop and one of the best purchases I've made.

However, it only came with 1GB worth of RAM. Foreseeing another 2-3 years of use out of this laptop, I plan to upgrade its RAM in the near future (1-2 months time) to 4GB.

My question is, have anyone used the full 4GB of RAM with a 5680 before. I did a little search around here and found that some user experienced problems with the 5610 with 4GB, and was wondering similar problems with the 5680 exist. I would like to confirm that 4GB would have no issues before buying the RAM.

Just for reference, my specs are as follows,
- Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0GHz
- 1GB RAM
- GeForce Go 7600 128MB
- 120GB Hitachi 5400RPM HDD

I'm currently using XP MCE (Default OS that came with the laptop) and I've always restored to factory default when I felt like clearing it of garbage. As this is a x32 OS, however, the 4GB would not be addressed fully. Thus, I'm wondering if I should switch to W7 when it comes out in a few weeks, more specifically W7 Ultimate x64. My main worries is that the drivers are not supported in W7 (And the Acer website didn't even have x64 driver support for Vista or XP Pro). So has anyone gone through this transition and if so, was the experience of reinstalling smooth?

Thanks

 

Anyone able to help?

 

I realize that this is about 2 1/2 months old, but I gotta add some sort of input.

I have the same model, only with a 1.6Ghz T5500. I added 2x2GB RAM modules in mine, only to find that I could only use 3GB out of 4GB. As it turns out, 1GB of RAM is reserved for "system use". There's a longer, more detailed explanation out there on the interwebs, but long story short -- that 1GB of reserved ram insures that the GeForce 7600 runs with no issues. It's hardware-enforced and there's no way to remove that reservation via BIOS. This problem not only shows up in x32, but also x64 as well.

BTW, I'm using W7 Ultimate x64 with absolutely no problems, other than the 3GB limit issue. The installation process was smooth and pain-free from a clean install. I wouldn't recommend going the upgrade path, as it took considerably longer and caused a number of issues. Acer's driver support is somewhat spotty, so I've had to use a combination of Windows drivers, drivers downloaded from manufacturers' websites and whatever decent drivers Acer had. You can use Vista drivers with caution if you can't find W7 ones -- in most cases, they'll work similarly.