RAM upgrade on a laptop - how important is matching

[ar7499]

I have just purchased a dell XPS m140 and I intend to upgrade the memory.

They are ddr2 so-dimms

my options are as follows:

buy one 1 gig card - about 80 bucks. I will have 1.25 gigs of ram, if I leave one of the original memory chips in there, but they will be unmatched - I think that is important for best performance. If I did this, does it matter which I have in which slot?

buy one 1 gig card and use it alone - do I get any benefit from doing this compared to the option above?

buy 2 512 meg cards that are matched, and use them both. Same price pretty much, and the cards will be matched.

If anyone has any input as to what will result in the best performace for photo and light video editing, it would be appreciated.


Thanks,

ar

[unclebud]

Why buy 2 512's if it's the same price as a 1 gb card when you could add another 1 gb card later.
Vista is coming and it will be hungry for ram.

[ar7499]

I'm just wondering if the performance difference between matched sticks and unmatched makes that big a difference.....

[ozymango]

I'm just wondering if the performance difference between matched sticks and unmatched makes that big a difference.....

I've never seen any difference, but YMMV. My disclaimer: I work tech support for a university and we are adding, swapping, moving, losing RAM in computers all the time and all we worry about matching (for the most part) is using one PC133 stick with another PC133 stick, and the like. So far (lots and lots of computers) we've had very few problems with machines puking on RAM mismatching, and even then it's been because one stick was just plain bad period.

That being said, if this is more about total RAM size and saving $$$, don't go the 512 route -- you'll definitely upgrade to more RAM later and you'd have to buy two new sticks instead of just one (if you buy a single 1gb). So go with the single 1gb stick, and put it in slot 1 of the memory bank, and pop your 256mb stick in slot 2 (or is it slot 0 and slot 1 nowadays?). Then fire it up and you should be fine. Worst case scenario, it beeps at you and doesn't boot, you take out the 256mb stick, sell it on eBay, and put the $$$ towards your next 1gb stick.

[redwudz]

Pretty much what ozymango said. Go for the bigger chip. You can check with most major manufacturers of memory for compatibility. Generally, XP can deal fine with 1 Gb of memory, much more, not really that useful unless you are using Photoshop or similar. Most encoding programs can't use the extra memory. As far as matching, if you have the same speed and same type, you should be OK.