help with my dell studio 15(1537)

well i bought this dell from the outlet as certified refurbished for 509 dollars, is this a pretty good deal?
Studio 15 (1537) Laptop: Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 (2.20GHz/1066Mhz FSB/3MB cache)
250 GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
Dell Wireless 1510 802.11a/g/n Draft Mini Card
Integrated 2.0 Mega Pixel Web Camera
15.4 WXGA LED Laptop Screen Display with TrueLife
Mobile Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD
6 Cell Primary Battery
3 GB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz (2 DIMMs)
8X DVD +/- RW w/dbl layer write capability

anyways besides if it was a good deal it came with vista 32 bit and i heard their ram is kind of iffy because sometimes they use different rams but i was wondering wat kind of ram do i get for this laptop? i know it only reads 3.25 gigs of ram but heard 4 gigs of physical ram makes it run smoothly, so i was wondering should i just add another 2 gig piece of ram and remove the 1 gig or just get 2 x2 gigs of ram, or am i fine with 3 gigs of ram...

also does anyone have experience with dells certified refurbished? im kind of worried that my laptop is going to be all messed up and not work fine or have scratches on it or something...

also besides the touchpad not working and the speakers is there any other problems and are their fixes for those? and wen u reinstall vista freshly and do u install the drivers from the cd or do u go online and install them?

 

3gb should run Vista nicely ... if you want to go to 4 you'll need to switch to 64-bit vista, otherwise as you noted you'll only gain an extra .25gb instead of the full 1gb.

 

snowboardpunk, Welcome to NBR.

Like Jason said, I would leave the computer at 3GB ram unless you are going to upgrade to 64-bit Windows.

Also, what do you mean that the touchpad and the speakers are not working?

When you reinstall Windows, you can either install the drivers from the CD(if it comes with one) or download potentially updated drivers from the Dell Support website.

 

well not working but heard some minor problems with them not running smoothly, also can this laptop use ddr3?

 

If your computer comes with DDR2 RAM you cannot remove it and install DDR3 RAM.

 

oh ok and wen u install the driver from wat i remember wen i reinstalled xp on my vostro, the drivers cd has some drivers jsut there and some with check marks, should i install all the drivers that are on the cd or just the ones with checkmarks next to them?

 

Probably just the ones with checkmarks where there are multiple drivers for the same piece of hardware involved. There might be some drivers that you need but won't have checkmarks.