Laptop RAM

[joroma]

I'm looking for a laptop for my son and have a budget of £400 max. It's mainly for school/uni assignments, music and the web (wireless). All current laptops come with Vista Basic or Premium. Some have 1gb of RAM others 2gb depending on the rest of the spec - what you gain on RAM you lose on the hd etc. Is 1gb RAM ok for Vista Premium/Basic?

Any views on the following (all £400 ).

Compaq Presario F500 - AMD Turion 64x2, 1gb ram, 120gb hd

Packard Bell MX37 - Pentium Dual Core, 1gb ram, 80gb hd

HP G6000 - AMD Athlon 64x2, 2gb ram,120gb hd

 

[TheVoice]

RAM is very cheap for 2GB anyway (£26 or thereabouts), so don't let it sway the decision too much. Get 2GB eventually if you can though, 1GB can be slow.

 

[Indy500]

Also, these usually have onboard graphics, which take 10% of the system memory. 1GB drops to 896MB, with the ATI\Nvidia chipsets anyway. Some manufacturers cap display memory at 8MB (usually with Intel chipsets).