Netbook Ram upgrade does nothing

Everything you do is probably limited by the horribly weak Intel Atom or the horribly weak Intel graphics.

I know the integrated graphics suck, but they do play movies and really old games like CIV2 and such. The only reason I bought this was I was away from home a few weeks and left my powercord home on my gaming laptop and wanted to use the internet, which was free at my hotel.

When I got home I swapped the ram out for 2gb and it made no difference.

The netbook is great for on the airline, and easy to carry around but I was a bit disappointed by the performance. The atom cpu really is pretty horrible for anything other than internet browser or word processor.

Isn't that what it was kind of meant for, and isn't that kind of exactly what you bought it for? It has plenty of memory to do what it was designed to do, and adding more just isn't going to get you very far.
You can go out and buy a new Prius, and just because you spend $250 and have a 10,000 pound load equalizing hitch put on it does not mean it is going to pull your 28 foot travel trailer.

Adding ram basically means that you can have more work going on at the same time with out loosing performance. It is not going to increase performance unless you are using applications that are ram heavy and had to use the virtual memory on your hard disk before.

Roger, I did a little more research, and somebody claimed in make the netbook run cooler, which would make sense if the HDD is being accessed less. Would you guys recommend shutting off the page file?

Well, if you really want performance.

maybe you should get an SSD. Most people i've talked to say that ssd helps alot with increasing performance. Your still going to be limited by the Atom cpu but it may make a difference in how fast it runs.

The dual-core Atom 330 netbook by Asus that comes with the Ion chipset and 2 GB of RAM is the pinnacle of netbook performance... sadly, its $500 prices puts in in range of more capable laptops that weigh just a few pounds more. Netbooks are just meant to be a 2nd or 3rd computer.

I'm thinking about giving it to the wife for "kitchen" PC or something. The ultraportables are really looking attractive. Better battery life then netbooks and much more capable. I wonder when this Ion chipsets will come out. Been hearing about them forever and still don't seem em. Like you said 500.00 is too much for a netbook, especially since there is no DVD drive.