Urgent Pre-Purchase Question, Will Be Buying When This is answered

I'm going to order an FW as soon as someone can help with me these questions.

1) It costs $100 to upgrade from 3GB of RAM to 4GB of RAM. I know a 32-bit OS can only see about 3.25GB of RAM, but with 4GB you get the benefit of dual channel mode, and with 3GB you don't. Are the performance gains with dual channel mode worth the extra $100 even though only about 200megs of the extra gig will be usable in the system?

2) I'm really torn on whether or not to get the blu-ray reader. It's $150 more and I don't think i'd use it very much, but it's also something that is hard to upgrade in a laptop. The screen will be 1600x900 Hi-Color. What would you do? This is more of an opinion, the question above is more technical.

Thanks!

 

1) With 3GB of RAM, the first 2GB should run in dual channel mode.

2) Depends on whether you will need it. With my older PC's, I never used by DVD drive so, for me, Blu-Ray was not even considered when I was looking for a new PC.

Good luck.

 

current ram is fast enough,so Duel Chanel gives you ~0.1% performance boost also,4gb ram kit now costs ~60$