Also xp does not 'see' more then 3gb of memory, or atleast can only use 3gb of memory. So when your looking for comparrison of 4gb of memory, you will need to use Vista. Another thing is 512mb of memory? That was a small amount on windows 2000 let alone xp.

The harddrive section was probably the best part, specially nice was the power consumption.

What I kind of missed was how much power the memory used, was it alot per gb or not so much?was ther alot of power consumption with different size harddrives?I was hoping for more of that type of info.

Other then that, good article.

I recently increased my HP Pavilion 6129us that uses XP from 1GB ram to 2 GB ram. The difference is very noticable, and makes the laptop more of a pleasure to use than a pain to use. My router speed increased, allowing me faster web page viewing and loading; Outlook opens faster, other MS applications open and close quickly.

The biggest difference was the web page and internet viewing, something that I hated to do on the laptop for the last 1.5 years, since no one I knew suggested that increasing ram would increase the router's speed to the laptop, including the geeks at Best Buy.

In short the increase of 1GB ram makes using the laptop closer to my desktop and since I appreciate speed in tasking, this was well worth the $45 it cost to buy the memory at Fry's.

I can't imagine going back to a slower machine and my only regret was I didn't do this memory upgrade sooner.

As an aside issue, I also increased my desktop Dell Vostro/XP from its stock 2GB ram to 4GB ram and also immediately experienced a faster speed in tasking, web viewing, opening and closing Outlook, all of the things I use my computer for.

Increasing the weak ram on stock machines can't be overstated enough, IME.