Hey Everybody, I have been using my Dad's old laptop for a while now, since he got one for work, and it isn't great, but it works for me. At least it did until now. It supposedly has 512MB of RAM, but in the system properties it says only 448MB. Either way, it has always been slow. (Even with its 2.8Ghz processor) So I have finally decided to splurge and buy some more RAM. I was going to buy another stick of 512MB, but as I was looking on newegg it looks like I can get 1GB for nearly comparable prices. So here is my question, will it cause any problems if I have one 512MB stick and one 1GB stick in there? Also, does anybody have any recommendations? Thanks, Svenjamin

It probably says 448 because the laptop video card is sharing the system ram, so its dedicating so much to the video. I cant see anything wrong with mixing two sticks, works most of the time, youll find out when you try, cause it either wont boot or will be unstable, but what I would do before buying anything is go to the manufacturers site and get the manual, most laptop manuals from the major companies, hp, toshiba, etc, will give you specific details related to memory and motherboard. Ive come across many that list the max memory the laptop will take.
Sometimes (a lot of the time) they ship with little ability to upgrade, in other words they are sold maxed out (doesnt make much sense to have a laptop board that supports 15 different cpus like a pc, how often is this upgrade done? so ship it with a cheaper board and cut the price) although ram is usually fairly upgradable on new models, at least able to double. Id check that first before anything.

Thanks for the reply. I'm pretty sure the laptop memory isn't maxed out, there is an open slot inside. If it doesn't work with with the mixed sticks, then I could just take out the old one and leave in the 1GB which would still be way faster than it runs now.

<mini-rant>
If I click the firefox icon, I can go to the bathroom and come back before the window has even come up! And there are only between 40-45 processes running on it! There are always delays of at least 10 seconds no matter where or what I click in windows! grrrr!
</mini-rant>

Ok, I'm alright now, thanks again for the help. Does anybody else have any helpful comments?
Svenjamin

Have you scanned for viruses and/or uninstalled Vista?* I'm serious; that's far slower than it should be. I've been using a 1.7 ghz, 386mb RAM laptop lately and it opens Firefox in a jiffy. The only time it's significantly slow is at start-up, but that's no big deal. It really sounds like you have some problem beyond not-so-great RAM if it's going at that speed.

* Joking about the Vista part! Well, partly.

Yeah, I do virus/spyware scans on a weekly basis at least, and Vista isn't running on it. I am going to reformat the whole thing tonight though, that should help. It is pretty old though, Our family has had it for about 5 years I think, I am going to use it this year at school, and then buy a new one when I get back from serving an LDS Mission. If I wasn't going to be doing that for 2 years, I would have bought a new one already.