memory and XP

Forget XP - the laptop would probably not even pass the POST (Power On Self Test) with that kind of memory installed. . .

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@OnCayman wrote:
Photoshop

Ultimately, the amount of ram you need completely depends upon your use of the computer.

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@Spiked_martini wrote:

Personally, I find that my 256MB is enough to run XP smoothly, and enough to run games. Unless you're using the kinds of programs that are RAM-intensive, as anettis described (and games aren't, because video cards use their own memory), then I don't think you need to go up to 512 or 1GB of RAM.

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spiked, I have to point out that you're really incorrect here.  Yes, the video memory is used in 3d games, but only to manage visual effects that appear on the screen.  The actual game program is much more than that - take Battlefield 1942 for example.  The entire game engine has to be loaded into memory, along with the details of the map, weapons, game physics, etc.  Plus data for the other players and so forth.

The bf1942.exe process (the game executable) regularly consumes over 300MB of memory while running.  If you have 256MB of RAM, that means the program is getting paged in and out of memory using the hard drive swap file, which is many orders of magnitude slower than RAM.

In a nutshell, 256 is NOT enough to properly experience modern 3d games.

(shrug) I don't play games like 1942, so I don't have any experience with it directly. All of the games that I play run with no noticeable slowdown at the highest available resolution (usually 1600x1200). I don't know if they'd fit into your idea of what "modern" is - the one I play the most often is WC3 (I've soured on PC games lately - they're all the same old thing. I've been buying more for my new GameCube than my laptop). The one program you cite is a RAM-hog - probably just means that it was poorly optimized because of release-schedule pressures. If you run programs that have high RAM usage, you're better off with more - that's a no-brainer.

But I seriously doubt that RAM usage over 256 happens as often as many people think, and IMO they're throwing their money away on an "optimization" that they don't need, when the money could be spend on something that would make a real difference to them in their everyday use of the computer, like a higer RPM hard drive.