laptop memory upgrade????

[jessem]

I have a toshiba satellite a45-s121 laptop with 256mb ram. The cpu is a 2.8 gz intel celeron. It is very slow running win xp home. I have a choice of buying another 256mb ram from kingston for $79 or buying two 512mb kingston ram sticks at $126 each and just put the original 256mb in my parts box.

Does anyone have an opinion?? Is 1gb of ram overkill for this relatively cheap machine?? I think I paid $800 new.

Thanks for your advice.

[proxops-pete]

I don't think so... unless you have fast HDD (at least 5400 RPM), slow HDD kills your overall performance, esp. when Windows has to use your HDD to swap files. I had 512 MB on my lappy (in sig) and it still had to swap quite a bit but when I upgraded to 768 MB (by switching out 256 MB w/ 512 MB), that swapping went down significantly! Overall performance is great! I will be upgrading to 1 GB total soon and I hope I can kiss swap files goodbye for most of the time! You can get good deals on eBay ... I got mine both from there for total of about $110!