I bought this Inspiron a year ago. I always carry a laptop on the road with me. It only came with 256MB of RAM and I've been meaning to add another Gig to it but had just never got around to it.

I had some free time on Friday and popped into the computer shop in the little town I was in and picked up a 1GB stick and popped it in.

Wow, what a difference a Gig of memory can make. It's like a totally different machine now. DVD playback is smooth as silk now, and everything is far more responsive.

I wish I had gone ahead and added the extra RAM a year ago. I didn't realize how slow this little machine had been until now.

The Creeping Performance Mods.

Just like in racing, you can get caught in an endless spiral of performance upgrade. It starts out innocently enough. "I'll put an aftermarket pipe on." That works well, but now the intake isn't enough. So you get aftermarket filters. Still not good enough, so you get velocity stacks and filters. Now you have to re-jet. 130 mains anyone? But your itch isn't scratched, so you get racing cams. Now you've got a boomer, but you worry about reliability. So you get the crank machined, new stroker rods. Hell, the engine is apart already - might as well go big bore. Now the clutch can't handle the power. After market dry clutch, but a 520 sprocket and chain conversion - a lighter chain reduces reciprocating mass. Now it's hard to keep the front wheel on the ground. New rear shock and a fork rebuild. All the great power and handling, and the bike still looks stock. New body work and a custom paint job. Then.....

You get the picture. Before you know it you've dropped serious dime.

Yeah, I've always had that problem with my computers. A little upgrade here, a tweak there. It does add up quick.

That reminds me, when I get home I need to add some RAM and a new video card to my desktop. LOL

Seriously though, a RAM upgrade is about the most cost effective performance enhancement one can make to their computer.

What you may never know is how much improvement you would get by just adding 128 or 256.

I had a P3 with 128K running Windows 2K. My wife was the main user and just did e-mail and web browsing. Just by having many windows open, she could bring the thing to its knees.

Problem solved by adding 64K--for a total of 192K

i suspect that nowadays we need at least a good enough p4 to not feel any "discrepancies" between apps(linux or win32 ported open sourced one expecially) of all sorts ...

jumping from p2 to p4(ok , probably with ample ram) makes comparisions of performance between different apps of the same category nonsensical and useless ...


.

Yeah, but what does changing processors have to do with RAM upgrades? I'm running a good P4, but that doesn't mean it doesn't need plenty of RAM.

hard to say actually ... i have seen p4 sold with whatever 256 ram , i bit weird for me ...

as for that processor vs ram thing , i think its true ... sometimes a p3 with good ram is more than good enough if our requirements are not that awesomely great ...


.

I would'nt even known you were talking about a bike until then. Wow man. Serious stuff.