do i need this ram or what

so i have 1 gb of ram in my laptop already and whenever i go into process manager under performance tab it usually says i have around 250-450mb of ram available depending on what im doing on my computer at the time

if i upgrade to 1.5 gb of ram is there going to be a visible difference in speed on my system
thanks in advance

specs are below
1.73 centrino
100 gb hd
1 gb ram

 

Probably not. If you are using 2x512mb sticks in your computer now, and you replace one of them with a 1GB stick, you will lose the dual channel performance of the previously matched memory pair even though you gain more overhead in memory volume. And unless you get to a point that you are actually outstripping your physical memory and forcing the computer to page out, I don't really see any need to increase it.

My 2 cents.

 

that was actually
.....really helpful man
thanks alot, do appreciate the ahelp

 

Best way to find out if you need more ram is to listen to your HD (or look at the status light).
Is it in regular use when you run programs?
Alternatively, open task manager or the performance log (under administrative tools), and enable the page faults listing. If the number of pagefaults keep growing, you need more RAM. A page fault is when data was needed that had been pushed to the pagefile to make room for something else in RAM.

However, as was pointed out above, you should also try to keep your ram symmetrical (2x512 or 2x1gb or 4x512 for that matter)

If you have 4 ram slots, that's not really a problem. If you've already got 2x512mb, you can just double that. (or add 2x56mb if you're feeling cheap)

But if you only have 3 ram slots, it's trickier.

However, if you get *a lot* of harddrive access/page faults, then yes, more ram will help, even if it prevents you from running dualchannel

 

Do u know of many laptops that have 3 or 4 ram slots?

 

Good point.

 

yeah thatd be one nice lappy though . No your usage is way below what you have currently. Now if it starts to go to 900+ then Id start to shop around. Plus you never NEED ram, its always a want issue. Most hdd's can support as much ram needs as you want, but the thrashing would kill your performance.