Whats with my RAM? WoW lags when loading things into memory?

Hey guys. Here are my system specs real fast:

CPU: Core2Duo T9300 @ 2.50 GHz

RAM: 4 GB Memory (Stock with Dell XPS M1530)

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit


Problem: Choppiness, but only occasionally when the game is loading new things into RAM. How can I tell? Because when I am sitting in front of Cenarion Expedition, it is for the most part very smooth on the highest gfx settings. When I turn around or move and the game has to show more things on screen, it lags! I can tell its loading/unloading things from RAM because in Task Manager I can see the RAM usage go up or down)

So, is there a problem with my RAM just being slow? with WoW? Should I upgrade to 64-bit Windows? I'm not really sure what to do to fix this problem.

The card is definetely not the problem in my opinion - I'm able to run games like Crysis and Left4Dead relatively smoothly. Again, WoW seems smooth except when its loading things into memory.

When a game loads new content into ram it has to read it off the hard drive, a more likely bottleneck. Maybe there is a problem with the drive the game is installed in, the game files could be heavily fragmented, reducing read performance. I would look into that before blaming the problem on ram.

I did see the disk being used very heavily. So what should I do about it?

I've just settled for maxed out settings and draw distance on 50%. Whatever. As long as it runs smoothly, I don't *really* need to see that level 80 warrior coming to rape me up the butt.

It is your hard drive, not your memory.
Your Dell laptop has a 5400 rpm drive, not exactly speediest of drives.
Access time will be slow when compared to a standard 7200 rpm desktop drive.
To conserve power, it probably also spins the drive down when it's not be accessed, then spins back up as needed, this will cause considerable lagging. Should be able to adjust the power saving features to keep the drive at full spin all the time, if you want.
Vista should be keeping it auto-defragged, but check on this.
There is not a whole lot more you can about it, just one of the things you will have to put up with while gaming on a laptop.......

QFT

go play something else lawl.

Yeah, Dell laptop with 5400 rpm drive. That pretty much explains it.

Where would I find those power savings? By the way, my laptop comes standard with a 5400 RPM but in config I opted to get a 7200 RPM drive.