I have 512 MB of RAM. I am thinking of maxing out my motherbaord to 2MB of RAM. Does having too much RAM hurt my performance?

Adding that much RAM won't hurt performance, but I do question the amount of performance you're going to gain from going to 2GB's of memory for the amount of money you're spending. While you should go to a gig of memory, I would consider upgrading the CPU before I would consider making the jump to 2GB's of memory. Depending on what your current video card is, you may also see a bigger jump in speed upgrading that instead, too. Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina...err...Rita. Starting to lose track... www.redcross.org

I have installed an extra 512 MB on my Athlon64 3000+ with 512 MB DDR400 system, and I do not see THAT much of a speed increase, unless I am running newer games... and even then it's like 20% increase in speed. Normal windows operation, 512 is enough (I have Win2000 SP3). I have been runing Mozilla, Firefox and IE and Nero etc..., and after 3 hours maximum RAM I used was 489 MB. You don't really need 1 GB, let alone 2 GB.

For gaming, I disagree. 512M isn't enough for optimal performance in many games today. You will see a landmark difference between 512M and 1 gig in Half Life 2, Battlefield 2, Lock On: Modern Air Combat, IL2: Forgotten Battles, Doom 3, FEAR, and many others. 2GB's of RAM however won't do much for you, although FEAR can benefit some. Furthermore, if you begin doing heavier multitasking or doing things like graphics work with Photoshop, video editing, etc., 1GB makes a big difference, too. Running a web browser while burning a CD won't tax a system's RAM very much comparatively speaking. Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina. www.redcross.org

i am goin to be doing things like music creating and connecting MIDI instruments to my computer and i dont want any delay from the instrument to the computer. Should i get 2GB RAM?

Honestly, for MIDI, no. 1GB is sufficient. Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina...err...Rita. Starting to lose track... www.redcross.org