On Sat, 10 Apr 2010, Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> A cheap way to make the machine a bit more responsive would be to whack
> more memory in.  Very few laptops won't take at least 2G of memory.
You obviously have much better kit that I do...
I have 9 laptops here only 3 of which are capable of running with 2GB RAM 
and only two of those are capable of accepting a 2GB module, one of those 
only has one memory slot so only one of them is capable of going above 
2GB.
> You'll be unlucky if it costs you more than 40 quid for a 2G module.
Where do you buy your RAM? From what I've seen 2GB modules start at around 
40 UKP (inc. VAT & shipping) and work on up...
It really depends on the age and spec of the laptop in question. Anything 
more than a couple of years old (and if the machine was originally shipped 
with XP and isn't a netbook, it probably is at least that old) may well be 
more memory limited than you think.
If the machine is running XP/IE though it is easy to check the memory 
capacity and type required on the Crucial website:
  
http://www.crucial.com/uk/
and in general I'd agree than even an upgrade to 1GB RAM would probably be 
worthwhile when running a modern distro, though as others have pointed out 
there are certainly plenty of distros that can run ok in 512MB (or even 
256MB) if upgrading isn't an option.
   Andy