thinkpad upgrade question

[thinkpad459]

hello i have a thinkpad R51 2883-8qu with a 1.4 Ghz pentium mobile windows xp intel extreme graphics 2 30 gig hd and 512 megs of ram my question is will upgrading the ram to the maximum 2 gigs fix the problem with my laptop running slow it usualy only seems to run slow when the pages im loading have lots of flash based content also i did a fresh install of the xp os last night


btw i traded my old xp desktop for this laptop at a local reputable computer repair and sales store i have less then 30 days to decide if i wanna keep this or upgrade to a different laptop keep in mind if i upgrade i would have to pay the difference the cheapest laptop they have is a pentium 4 mobile with roughly the same specs accept the fact that it has a radeon gpu instead of an intel gpu please help me solve this thanks

[RealBlackStuff]

One 1GB PC2700 Sodimm costs $25-30 and you'd need two, while abandoning the 'old' 512MB. That's $50-60 just for RAM.
A 30GB HD just doesn't cut it anymore these days: $70-100 at least for another decent sized PATA HD.
The R51 is a rather old machine already, that takes expensive DDR RAM and expensive (and getting hard to find) PATA drives.
Return it for a refund and look around in our Market forum for e.g. a much better and more modern T61 such as this: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=105600

[pianowizard]

Find out what laptops he has that use DDR2 RAM and SATA hard drives and choose among them. Laptops that are older than these just cost too much to upgrade.

BTW, your R51 has these components:

P M 715, 256MB RAM, 30GB 4200rpm HDD, 14.1 XGA(1024x768) TFT LCD, Intel Extreme, 24x24x24x/8x CD-RW/DVD, Intel 802.11b/g wireless(MPCI), Modem(CDC), 10/100 Ethernet(LOM), UltraNav, Secure Chip, 6 cell Li-Ion battery, WinXP Pro

So RBS is right, besides upgrading the RAM (by replacing 2x256MB with 2x1GB), you would also need to upgrade the very slow HDD. Not worthwhile at all!