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Obviously there are advantages, but on a low-end laptop ($600-ish), would you really see much improvement in web browsing, fairly high gaming, dvd watching, and overall windows XP performance (yes, I use XP over vista..vista is ram hog
)?
Money IS an option, however, I can afford the extra $100 to upgrade, however, is it really
needed?
Get a single 1GB DIMM first and see how it treats you; you can always upgrade to a second GB later if you find it needed (install is
very easy)
With the tasks and OS you've listed I say that 1GB will probably be enough (with the exception of gaming, but I hope you realize you won't be doing much of that on a 600 dollar laptop)
if you check slickdeals.net you can often find 1GB sticks for around $35 after rebates.
i'd get it. it's the cheapest way to significantly improve your PC
You don't need any rebates. newegg has notebook ram for $30-$35 per 1 GB stick.
If your laptop came with either 1x512mb or 2x512mb sticks, then buying a 1 GB stick and running with 1.5 GB is an option.
Forget all the post above since none of them knows what you run on your laptop. First open Taskmanager. Look at you memory usage, run all the program you usually run and see how much RAM you are using, if you can mostly stay under 1GB then getting another Gb will be absolutely useless. Now if you are constantly going over 1GB then another GB will definately show some improvement.
the above statement is wrong
you'd never know if you were "going over 1GB" because obviously windows can't use more than you have, so it will remove some stuff from the RAM, and put other stuff in its place (this takes time), so the more RAM you have, the less this happens
AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology TL-50
Genuine Windows® XP Home
15.4 inch Wide Screen XGA Display with TrueLife(glossy)
1GB DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz, 2 Dimm
80GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
8X CD/DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capability
ATI RADEON® Xpress1150 256MB HyperMemory (Integrated)
Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g Mini Card (54Mbps)
Integrated Audio
is $500, so I mean, that's pretty good in my opinion. I'm not the type of person that runs like 3 messengers, dvd encoding, harddrive backing up, cd burning, games playing all the the same time kind of user. But I this this is good enough. I think I'll go for 2 gig at newegg.
Have you ever look at Taskmanager? It show memory usage including page file . Windows will use HD space as memory when it runs out of physical RAM and Taskmanager will include that as the total memory being used.
Crucial currently has DDR2 800 memory modules for notebooks, according to the specs they use the same 1.8v that other DDR2 memory uses so I am not sure if there is any power draw increases. Also note that the price is higher for 800mhz because it is new and it is kind of hard to find at the moment.
Unless you're gaming, or running graphic intensive software with large files, there is generally little need for ram above 1 GB. For the basic activities you have described 1 gb should be more than sufficient. I currently run 512 MB and only ever run into difficulties if I have 10 or more browser windows open while surfing. But I use Mozilla, which tends to be very leaky for memory. I generally have a couple of large Word documents, severeal excel spreadsheets, a 2D mapping program and a few maps, winamp, and a couple of browser windows open and have yet to run into a lack of ram under these circumstances.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
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