I've just seen an advert on TV for a laptop with 1 GB of RAM! Does a normal or even a games player need that much RAM in their system??

Hi DaveB: I'm not a gamer nor do I use XP but consider a few things. In my opinion XP should be run with a minimum of 256 RAM. 512 would be better if you use memory intensive programs. Especially if you use multiple programs at the same time. I often do this when I'm manipulating photos. Add to that the resource hungry high end games of today then it is not unreasonable in my opinion to need that much RAM for some people. Of course there are other factors to consider when gaming. And if you plan on upgrading to Vista next year you might very well need that RAM as well as other hardware. If the hardware exists programmers will write for it. Just my unqualified opinion; RandyL

and if it has Shared Memory on-board graphics (which is likely in a laptop), the graphics will have stolen some of that ram. Eg. laptop with 512mb ram and 128mb shared memory graphics only really has 384mb of ram for what ram is really used for.

wow, where have you been? 1GB is recommanded for most gamer today. 512 is not enough any more. laptop with 1gb ram is common today. especially when vista comes out, you will need at least 1GB ram.

For Battlefied 2142 the minimum requirements for RAM is 512MB. The recommended is 1.5GB Michael J