I am a little hesitant... on one hand I am thinking of buying a new laptop, whereas another option would be to just upgrade it using a little more memory.

My laptop has a Mobile AMD Athlon™ XP 2600+ processor with 512 MB of RAM. On one hand the computer works fine, but I would like it to have a little more power. Sometimes for example I would like to play a nice game on it and this can be problematic.

So... I could buy a new one, which will cost me a lot of money, but I can also buy some extra RAM, which would be relatively cheap. On the other hand, I am probably buying a new laptop in a few years anyway. My laptop at the moment is two and a half year old.

What are your thoughts...

~M

PS: never buy a laptop with integrated video card... it sucks!

Hmmm... That's a good question. I suppose if you think that adding some more memory to your current laptop would solve the problem when you are using large programs, then you could try that route. I'm not sure how much that would cost for you... Maybe if you just want to use that to hold you over until you are ready to buy a new one?

I know I always had that problem with my laptop - it not being fast enough or powerful enough to run the programs that I wanted to... so in the end, I decided on getting a monster of a desktop, with enough power for me to run a few of those big programs at a time, as well as my music, and about 20 browser windows. I know... it may sound excessive, like why would I have to, I'm just saying, now that I upped my power, I'm so much happier with what I've got, that I'm sure you will be too.

So, you could up your ram, which should solve your problems for now, and if you were planning to keep the laptop for a few more years, that might just be worth it for you. And if it's relatively cheap, then at least you'd be saving up the larger costs for when you do need that new laptop.

But on the other side of the coin... new laptops are always nice lol... and I was thinking about getting one of those for myself, eventhough my computer is only about half a year old. I was also thinking about getting a mac, cause the one that I'm on now is a pc, and I'd like to have both so I could use different programs that run better on the macs.

Its good to know that I am not the only one facing this problem. I agree a new laptop is always nice, but also a lot of money (in case you want to have a decent one).

I am not sure yet how expensive it is going to be. One of the bad things is that there are currently two blocks of 256 Mb in there I think (although I can only find one of the blocks) and so to upgrade, I actually might have to buy two blocks of 512 Mb and through out my blocks of 256... so that would make it more expensive.

M

there would be a few things i would look at first. If you have the cash to buy a decent laptop that will work for what you want then just go buy a new one.

But considering you are wondering about it i would guess you might not want to use the cash on that so then it would be better and cheaper to just upgrade the memory but upgrade it properly if you can get two 1 meg chips do that it will make a big difference but that is if you just want a bit more speed with the stuff you are using already that is not working too badly.

But if like you said it is battleing to run games and or other apps i would check if your laptop has a abiltiy to upgrade the video card, i would guess not as that is what would be giving you the most hassle with games especially. then it would make more sense to spend a bit of cash and buy a really good laptop that has a good video card and processor that will work for the next few years before you need to upgrade again.

But at the end of the day it is what you want youe laptop to be able to do, look at what you need or want out of your laptop and then decide what you going to do if you just want it to run more efficiently then go the upgrade mem root but if it is just battling way to much with everything then buy a nice new one with all the bells and whistles !

My laptop (my only computer) has only 248MB RAM, so think yourself lucky! I can barely run 3 programs without slowing down or even crashing!

It seems the major problem with laptops is the video. If the problem lies in the laptop not being able to run high-end games then I'd go with a new laptop with an upgradable video adapter AND more memory. Extra memory always helps unless the laptop has a weak video adapter.

I say go for the extra memory. a Athlon XP 2600 is more than enough for a laptop and if you were to buy a new one you probably wouldnt even get that.

I recently upgraded my memory from 768 to 1024mb. Even though it was only a 256mb upgrade i definately noticed the difference.

2 years is relatively quick to switch to another laptop. IMO, 1 laptop can last for at least 4 years depending on how well you take care of it. But sometimes you cannot blame yourself, the world of IT moves so quickly, you thought you have one of the latest up to date technology running on your laptop but in a few years a new thing comes out and your technology is deemed 'outdated'. I rest my case, if you want to play games it is best to do so on a desktop, there is no point spending so much money on a high end laptop which can play games when you can get a much much more powerful desktop with that money. If I were to give you any suggestion, that would be to decide what kind of games you want to play, if it is the high end type, it would be best to get a desktop for it. But if it is those middle end games, it would be wise to upgrade your memory alone and check whether you can purchase a new graphics card.

Buying a graphic card you have to be very careful because it does not only depend on that, there are several other factors such as your processing speed amongst other things. I have been through it, I bought a graphics card for my desktop a while back, I was a noob back then and I bought a graphics card which was just too powerful for my computer so now when I play games, after about say 40-50 minutes, the graphics rendering would be distorted and I can't enjoy my games. The best thing to do if you are thinking of upgrading your graphics card would be to bring your system down. Have a good talk with the person-in-charge, and ask him to suggest what kind of graphics card would suit you. By the way, are you using an integrated graphics card or an external one?

In my Sony Vaio laptop, I originally had 512 mb but then I went in to add another 512 mb memory module in it. Let me quote you what was said in my technical specifications sheet.

If you install memory modules of the same capacity to both of the 2 memory module slots, your computer will run in dual channel mode and provide better performance.

I do not know whether it is the same case for all computers, but chances are that it should be the same. I installed it, and it really feels different. I could open up Photoshop, NetBeans, ITunes, Tons of Firefox windows and still have memory left to spare. A plus point is that it will not slow down your system as much as a original 512 mb memory would do.