As some of my previous posts may have hinted, I've not been overly enthusiastic about Vista on my notebook. Mostly due to poor performance.

Recognising that this might have something to do with the amount of memory in the notebook, I started researching upgrading. Now, I would have thought 512MB plenty, after all it was many years before I had a hard disk this big, let alone system memory but that's progress I suppose.

The sweet spot seemed to be upgrading to 2GB. I had a look on the Crucial website to use their various tools for checking what I needed. It makes it much easier as I'm not up to speed (no pun intended) on the different memory types around at the moment.

As the notebook is dual channel, it made sense to replace both SODIMM boards with a kit made up of two 1GB boards. The price is just £30 at the moment for the 2GB kit that they were kind enough to send in for testing.

I've still got to collate the test results but the effect of Vista has been both immediate and positive. The time needed to startup has been dramatically reduced. Previously I could be waiting anything up to 10 minutes before I could actually start using the computer. Now Vista is responsive from when the desktop loads.

In fact I'm tempted to revise my position from the post I made earlier in the month asking if Windows XP was worth the extra £25 Dell were asking. If the choice was between XP and Vista with more memory, I think I would go for Vista now.