Humm... Shame I was not online when this debate started. I would like to have jumped in that the beginning.
WCollins,
Lets get the comment into context.
Fogbound had just bought a Packard Bell Easynote T5 135 notebook for £799. I could not see telling him that he should spend a lot of money to get that notebook up to 1GB or 2GB of SODIMMs. I cannot see him using the notebook for SQLServer + IIS. He would end up spending more money on RAM than what he paid for the notebook itself.
For the average user, 512Mb is perfect for them. If someone doing Audio/Video Editing and some other memory intensive applications, 1Gb or more RAM is required. I cannot see recommending to someone who just bought a notebook to buy a pair of:
1GB 200Pin SODIMM PC2100 DDR Non-Parity CL2.5 from Dabs.com for a total of £858.00.
If they are going to surf the net and play a some games.
With Win9x it has been shown over and over that if you add more than 256Mb of RAM, the computer will run slower. (Due to the size of the index for the RAM.) With WinXP it has been shown that you hit the best performance when you hit 512Mb of RAM and unless you are working with large files that need the added RAM, there is no gain in performance in adding more.
Take Care,
Richard