Seek opinion on benefit of more ram for editing?

[hankduck]

I work with a Compaq Presario laptop, 1.4 MHz Celeron and 624 MB of ram. My dedicated video drive is an external firewire 120 Gig. Barracuda Ultra/ATA (7200 rpm). I capture analog video with a Canopis ADVC100.

I have been trying Pinnacle Studio 9, Sony Vegas Movie Studio 4.0, and an SE OEM version of ULead's Video Studio.

My laptop's max ram capacity is 1 Gig.

I'd appreciate an opinion on whether or not adding ram from the 624 mb up to 1 Gig on the laptop would improve the speed of editing with any or all of these editing programs???

[redwudz]

It would probably help a little, but not a whole lot. You can generally tell if you need more memory by monitoring your HD use. Windows uses that for your extra memory space when needed.

Task Manager will tell you your memory and CPU usage. Editing uses CPU, memory and HD all at once. A faster CPU would be the most help, but with a laptop, not really an option.

Bottom line, IMO, it would help, but I would only expect a small gain for the cost of the memory. If it's your only alternative and you have the money to spare, go ahead.