Anyone know how much memory costs these days?

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I have an Acer notebook PC that I bought about two years ago, and its memory is DDR2. It only has 768 Meg of it. I just bought Microsoft Flight Simulator X, which is the latest version of that software franchise, and it's running slow. I have no idea how much video RAM I have -- maybe just the 32M that Microsoft gives as the minimum requirement to run Flight Sim, or maybe I have 64. Ya, I think it's 64.
And its a 2.0 Ghz AMD CPU. (The AMD version is "Turion" or something beginning with "T".)
And I'm running Windows XP Media Center Edition.

So... what should I upgrade the most? What's my biggest bottleneck to speed? The main memory, or the video memory? Keep in mind I'm a poor man, so I can't do both. It's when I fly over lots of land / scenery that it really slows down. So would that be video memory?

I spent US$100 to get 2 2GB sticks of RAM, for a total of 4GB, the maximum my computer would accept. You'll want to look up your specific model of notebook to find out how much RAM it will accommodate (should be on the box or on the manufacturer website). Since you're using a 32-bit OS, your computer won't be able to use more than 3GB of RAM.

For a graphics-intensive program like Flight Simulator, it's probably the video RAM that becomes an issue first. XP is lean enough that it should run fairly smoothly with 768MB, though running Flight Simulator while you also have ten other programs running in the background will slow it down.

Thanks for the help.

Okay, turns out my video RAM is 512MB. Could I really need more than that? Or should I increase the 768MB of normal memory to, say, 2GB instead?

Wait, I'll bet video RAM is "shared" with my regular memory. Not good, gaming-wise.

To really answer that question we'd have to know what kind of video chip you have - probably you have "integrated" graphics, meaning it does use regular system memory in place of having dedicated video memory. In this case upgrading your main memory will help a lot.

Most likely you can't upgrade the video chip/memory without replacing the whole laptop, anyway, so upgrading the main memory is probably the cheapest thing to do.

In order to upgrade, you need to find out how much memory your computer can support maximum, and how many slots you have for ram (most laptops with ddr-2 have 2 slots) in which case the best thing to do is buy two identical sticks, each of which is half the maximum capacity.

ddr 2 prices <- as you can see here DDR 2 prices have come down a LOT recently. Unless your computer is a newer one with huge max ram size, you can usually max out your computer for not very much money at all.

Agreed with the paired sticks.

Also make sure you specifically ask the vendor before if they are compatible, even if you have checked the manufacturer’s specs and you are defiantly sure. I bought some shoddy ram recently and that came in handy because they can't exactly go back on what they said. Only one specific stick was working, the other one came blown as indicated by the error lights and beeps. I am always extra careful when installing so it definitely came like that. They said they checked it before the sent it, but really I think they couldn't have known for sure because the trader was in the US and the stock in the UK using a shipping agent. They asked me to flash the bios. I was happy to upgrade it, even though it was quite recent. No go, clearly dud. I managed to get my money back and the postage after while, especially as they took forever to process the order let alone arrive.

Ram has come down in price, just in the past year. What kind of notebook you using ragtime.

I think we're getting about 2g for $24, but we're a major company.

Yup..actually, I just upgraded the memory in my home-built to 1 gig (it's about 7 years old, but does all the mundane things I need it to do. I've got another system next to it for the advanced stuff.. I paid about $20 for a stick of 512 (got 2, because the slowest speed I could find was 333Mhz). So $40 for the lot.

I just upgraded to 2 gigs. FS runs noticeably better now, but still not great. I basically have two choices: 1. fly nearly in realtime, or 2. see a relatively-fast slide-show of scenery images in front of my plane . So, FS runs just great sans scenery.

I guess whenever I get another computer, I'll make sure it's a gaming computer first. I can add more RAM, and I'm told that running Windows XP (as I am), the system can utilize up to around 3.5 of 4 gigabytes maximum that I can put in. Will that increase FS's speed significantly, or am I pretty much "there" already, as far as this computer goes? Again, it's a 2.0 Ghz AMD Turion, so definitely not the fastest laptop CPU out there. And, even though the video memory is shared, the techie at MicroCenter said if the video memory reports being "512 MB" (as it does), that means that the video card will only use that much of the shared memory. So, even if I upgrade to the 3.5 GB RAM, my video card's performance won't increase, because it probably is already utilizing that full half-gig, after last night's upgrade.

But thanks for the help, everyone. Maybe near the end of this year I'll get a better laptop.

A bit late of me to enter something in this thread now, but I think that this page: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2612 might interest you.

The document is from 2005, but you did say that the laptop where bought 2 years ago and the document focuses on integrated graphics with 512MB of RAM in one part also.

stupid question: have you tried lowering the settings?

Looking over the specs I'd think even a Turion would be able to handle it. The graphics detail level doesn't look super high (new) and the requirements are quite low.

1Ghz CPU 256MB RAM for XP 512MB for Vista 32MB video RAM DX9

Well I can't post the link to the MS FSX requirements page yet.

Adjusting settings may help, but first I'd make sure the graphics drivers are up to date. Maybe look for game specific settings in the video control panel. The game should be in a hardware settings presets list in the 3D Graphics control panel. I see MS FSX is listed in my Nvidia drivers and I'm sure ATI has it to. The GPU and GPU to shared system RAM data rate are probably the bottle necks, but the way that game looks it should be a fair match for a Turion era laptop.

The tech sounds like he knew his stuff, but a couple things to double check are:

1) If the "512MB Video RAM MAX" is listed on the laptop marketing specs its possible it needs to turned up in the BIOS settings still. It may have been set to a lower fraction of the original RAM like 128MB out of 768MB to insure the system would still always have 512MB. Although I don't see why increasing the fraction of system RAM used for video RAM much above 128MB would matter a lot with a 32MB requirement except that is probably a minimum requirement for low settings.

2) If a system comes 1 stick of RAM and 3 slots like some laptops some people buy a new pair (2 sticks) and move the old stick to the third slot. This can ruin performance by causing the system to lose Dual Channel memory access mode (ie it halves the data rate in Single Channel mode).
The solution is to pull the old stick and sell it and only use the 2 matching sticks (pair) so when the system POSTS it should say Dual Channel mode.

A friend upgraded a cheap laptop (slow hard disk) with Vista 1GB RAM to 3GB DDR2 and it ran so much slower he finally went and bought a new laptop not knowing what was wrong

Some new systems are going to triple channel ( must be bought in 3's ), but dual channel is the norm currently.