Do I need Memory Upgrade?

I have Toshiba Satellite M70 with 1.73 P-M. It has 40 GB SATA drive and 512 MB ram.
All I do is surfing and working with Office( Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc). No games/ movies/ or photos. I am using XP Home SP2.
I have installed memory widget from Yahoo and the memory used mostly is between 50-85 %( varying according to my Notebook use). I want to ask should I upgrade my memory to 1 or 1.5GB? Will it give me any advantage as far as speed is concerned. I do feel some times my system a bit slow( it happens when after a boot first time I open any programmes/ folders like browser, Word, or MS OneNote, My Computer etc-- next time I open the same folder/ programme, it is faster). I want everything to open really fast.
Thanks for any help.

 

512MB should be fine for winxp and office, but if u can get a good price, buy another 512mb.

 

Thanks, BTW I do open a lot of tabs in Opera and firefox and I see them using about 200 MB memory collectively sometimes with so many tasb open in both.
Also I fell whenever I start my system from hibernation my system si slow and stucks for a few minutes. I though may be I am short of memory.

 

I thought the way to check if you needed more memory was to open the Task Manager and go to the Performance tab. Then compare the peak commit charge with the total physical memory. If the peak commit charge exceeded the total physical memory, then you needed more memory.

Anyone know if this is true?

 

You may have a lot of programs and applications running automatically during start up. Open your task manager to check the usage of your cpu and memory.

Adding more memory is the cheapest way to upgrade a computer, unless you have the almost extinct Rhambus type.

 

This is a good question and I did not know the answer, so I did some research and this is what I found.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/expert/dunn_03august11_ram.mspx

It looks like that is a pretty good measuring stick. As it turns out, I have 1 Gig of ram and I need more. I've been looking for an excuse to buy some and now I have one.

 

Thanks for that dallen.

 

Added memory is the least expensive way to get a performance improvement and it can make a big difference.

For example, my siste rand I have the same PC (tho I use SCSI drives and she doesn't), however. i have 768MB and she has 384MB of memory.

Recently, she installed a particular program that caused her use dmemory to be over 300MB. she had great difficulty trying to do anything else while that program was running.

On my system, running the same program still left me with plenty of memory to start other apps.

Even a simple program can require lots of memory. And, if you do not have enough memory, then the pagefile will be used, which is a real performance hit.

For example, the following very simple program uses 3764KB when it first loads on my PC. But using the program to analyze the files on only the D drive causes the memory use to increase as high as 160MB for just that program as the program.

http://www.standards.com/index.html?CompareDrives.

 

Thanks all of you.
I think to be on safer side it will be better to get 1G, however I may go fine with this 512 as well.