What is the benefit of adding more memory? Currently my Dell Dimension 4100 has 128mb with an open slot. If I were to add more memory would I notice a difference in performance? Speed? Sorry if this is too simple of a question! Thanks for your time!

XP loves memory and it will run on 128megs but it is slow. Do yourself a huge favor and upgrade to at least 384megs or better yet make the jump to 512.

You will notice a huge difference. I run 512 in my XP box and would never think about running anything less.

KTTD

The benefit of adding memory is speed and less wear and tear on your hard disk. When the operating system needs more memory and there isn't enough free memory, it has to write some of the info in memory to the hard disk (swapfile), which will then allow that portion of memory to be free. When that info is needed again, some other chunk of memory is freed by writing that info out to disk, allowing memory to be available for that first portion of info to be placed back into memory. Plus, disk access is considerably slower than memory access. Therefore, you can see that it's beneficial in regards to the speed of your system to have plenty of memory, as the above process is required less (or not at all) with more memory.

As Kevin notes (and is my opinion also), XP is slowed down by running with 128 Meg (or less) of RAM. I recommend at least 256 Meg (add a 128 Meg stick to your system), but 384 is even better (add 256 meg). It depends upon what you run, as well. If you just use a browser and an office application from time to time, you're not going to get a lot of benefit by upgrading. However, if you play certain games or use lots of apps at once (and it depends upon the apps, as well), then there's definitely an advantage in upgrading.

I'm guessing you're using PC-133 SDRAM DIMMs, but you should check your motherboard manual to be certain.

Good luck.