Is it worth adding RAM to a 2 year old notebook?

Hi & Thanks,
A lot of you SF'rs are a lot more technologically proficient than me and I appreciate your input!

I have a 2 year old HP notebook. Pretty good laptop back then. A 3.4 Pentium chip, with 512 RAM(I believe 128 is dedicated to the video card), and an 80Gig HD. I'm running XP Home and don't plan to change anytime soon.

My question is about additional RAM. I can get a 1 GIG stick on Ebay for about $100. That would give me 1256 of RAM. Has anyone actually added a 1 GIG RAM chip to an older laptop that had 256 or 512 of RAM standard? Did you notice a difference?

It should be a remarkably significant difference. I never understood why laptops were so slow to jump on the 1gig RAM standard. They're still selling them now with only 512, it's crazy.

Everything will load much faster. Especially on XP which is eating up quite a bit.

*In addition, if you have 2, 256mb chips in there now, you will need to remove both. I highly doubt it will let you have 1gig + 256mb at the same time. Usually it's one large stick of memory or two smaller identical sizes. Not 2 different sizes at once.

Originally Posted by vanity

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It should be a remarkably significant difference. I never understood why laptops were so slow to jump on the 1gig RAM standard. They're still selling them now with only 512, it's crazy.

Everything will load much faster. Especially on XP which is eating up quite a bit.

*In addition, if you have 2, 256mb chips in there now, you will need to remove both. I highly doubt it will let you have 1gig + 256mb at the same time. Usually it's one large stick of memory or two smaller identical sizes. Not 2 different sizes at once.


Well, remember I bought it 2 years ago. I think they are still selling "Budget laptops", new, right now, with 512 RAM. But this is kind of silly since Vista will require 1 Gig of RAM I believe. But these are the "Budget Laptops", that are $399 and are primarily for word processing and simple web surfing I believe.

As to a 1GIG chip of additional RAM I checked the Kingston memory configurator, and I definitely could configure a 256 + 1 GIG memory bank configuration. AAMOF, I have to, since 1 bank is under the keyboard and can't be gotten to.

I'm basically trying to get another year or two out of this HP! I know I can get a new Dual Core Processor, 1 GIG, 100G HD, laptop for about $750 plus tax, but I don't have any multi-media needs, and I'm thinking maybe I can spend this $100 for additional RAM vs. $750 for a new laptop.

And I figured I'd wait at least a year till I go to MS Vista!

I just a week or two ago added a 512 MB SODIMM to my Compaq R3000z. Had 256 MB before, the difference is remarkable. It is suddenly usable and significantly, startup times are less than a third of what they were.

I would do it. A few years ago added 512MB of RAM do my desktop that only had 256MB to start. The change was huge and was well worth it. It doubled the FPS for gaming.

If there is a Staples Office Supply store around you we have all 1 gig sticks DDR and DDR2 Notebook and Desktop for $99 no rebates or anything (I think its PNY brand too). You should have no problem mixing and matching memory. It sounds like a decent computer that you have right now so bumping the memory will be a big improvement.
Also Vista basic only requires 32bit processor and 512mb ram minimum but runs incredibly slow with minimum specs. Been selling a ****** $320 Tower (Celron D, 512mb ram) like hotcakes with vista basic. Its pretty much worthless but people are dumb and dont want to pay the extra couple bucks for a computer with over twice the power.

Computers are so fast now I still run my computer from 5 years ago for Windoze. Max your laptop out on RAM. My powerbook is 2 years old, 4x slower than the new ones and I still do not plan on upgrading because it suits all my needs.

Do it. Multitasking is so much better when you have 1 gig or more of ram.

With the specs on your particular system, the RAM should provide a great deal of performance boost.