RAM Upgrade

In the past two weeks, I noticed my laptop, a Sony Vaio PCG-GRV670, starting to have some performance issues. After further investigation, I discovered that one of my RAM slots or RAM cards is having some sort of connection problem. I have two 256 MB PC2100 DDR RAMs that came with the unit. So for the past two weeks, I was running Windows XP with only 256 MB of RAM. When I got both cards working again and restored the RAM back to 512, the performance degrading issue was resolved. This confirms that XP definitely needs a minimum of 512 MB of RAM to run smoothly especially if you want to use programs such as Photoshop.
Then I decided to upgrade one of RAM cards to 512MB which will give me a total of 768MB of RAM. I purchased a PC2700 which is downward compatible to my PC2100. After I installed the new RAM card, I immediately noticed a major boost in performance. Although I am not able to take advantage of the faster speed of a PC2700, it is working just fine so far.
I opened up multiple programs including Photoshop, Macromedia Flash MX, and Dreamweaver which are all resource hungry applications. The performance did not degrade even when I was using some intense filters on photoshop to manipulate photos. I am extremely impressed with the performance improvement simply by increasing my RAM by 256MB. It makes a difference. When in doubt, increase RAM! Below is a screenshot of my desktop with multiple programs opened at once. The bar at the top of my desktop is Norton's system monitoring program which tracks various performance attributes. "PM" stands for "Physical Memory". Click on the image for a larger version in my actual screen's resolution which is 1280 by 1024.

Now, I am thinking about getting another 512MB of RAM to give me a total of 1024 or 1 GIG of RAM which is the maxium amount my laptop can handle.