Recently boosted up the R500 with Vertex 4 SSD & 8 GB of memory. The memory is Samsung 2x 4 GB, type M471B5273DH0-CH9. I avoided picking the cheapest/value memory (the price diff was just a few euros). Also did fresh install of Win 7 64-bit.

Just wanted to say it works fine (and very, very fast!) in case anyone's thinking about similar upgrades. Everyday tasks are now much faster and booting up is lightning fast. Some sellers mentioned the R500 only takes 4 GB max (and didn't want to sell 8 GB ), but looks like that's not true.

Just like a brand new computer! With that much RAM, you can disable the pagefile.

Yes, it's fairly impressive how a SSD can make an old machine seem brand new performance wise unless one needs top performance.