I would second the suggestion to give a linux distro like ubuntu a try, they are generally more efficient, and firefox is better on unix IMO.
Is 8GB ram overkill for a laptop? (I want to minimize or eliminate disk swapping. I do some memory heavy stuff and the current 3GB seems to be a tidbit too little)
Impressive :)
I setup Windows XP Pro on a system with 59 MB of memory (after 4MB shared video memory and 1MB bios/etc caching) years ago for someone, and apparently it's still chugging along, if you only open one thing at a time. :P And at that... i had the tweak the snot out of it.
LOL. I guess nothing is "too much" if you need it. Have you tried Windows 7 yet? I has a massively optimized swap file usage compared to NT 4.x through Vista. (i've never used anything before NT 4.x) On "only" 4GB memory on my new i7 860 machine (GTX 460 GPU), and it uses so little virtual memory that I don't bother to show it in my task manager. Like a few hundred KB at most, even for pretty intense games like Mafia 2. (not that i get much time to play games, but when i do, this system lets me crank everything to the max, and get 60+ FPS)
I run W7, it is petty nice and certainly much faster than vista.
When just using firefox (5-10 tabs) it uses around 400MB of swap space on the disk. this figure goes up when using more memory heavy applications of course. Being a laptop it uses a slow 5400 rpm "green" platter drive which causes swapping to slow down stuff all the time, which is very annoying. I think that if I were to increase the ram available to the system it would minimize the need for swapping?
If you are running a 32-bit version of Windows it can't see more than around 3.5gigs of it anyway so there'd be little or no advantage. Many older PC hardware designs may get little or no advantage from over 4 gigs of RAM.
Then the question becomes, can I get working drivers for a given piece of hardware with 64-bit Windows?
Forgot to add that detail: It is fairly new and uses W7 x64, intel i3 cpu and so-dimm ddr3 memory (currently 2+1GB modules, do I need matched memory modules to get the double data rate? if so: matching cas latency or both matching size and matching cas latency?). From what I know 64-bit systems tend to be more memory hungry, perhaps that is why it starts swapping all the time?
Both true and untrue. The reality is that the memory is actually addressed with 36 bits, but microsoft has chosen to limit it to 4GB based on licensing. This has been proven, and although I can't recommend it, people have altered their kernals to bypass the version check that sets the limit on this, and enabled way more memory in 32bit Windows. I have a friend that has 8GB in Windows 7 32bit, completely usable. :) But for practical purposes, 99.99% of people should consider this as a real limit.
It really depends on the mainboard's BIOS, and the chipset's capabilities. I haven't heard of any specifically that allow any mixing and matching between pairs. What I have heard of, and now have one of, is a mainboard with 4 slots that can use a second pair that is different from the first pair with the only limitation I think maybe being the clock speed.
Although I haven't tried the unlocked overclocking features yet, since the machine is so dang fast I could care less about overclocking. But that enabled different parts of the FSB and sub-buses to clock independently of each other, and that or actually adding another pair of sticks might enable a second memory clock setting in my BIOS.
Even if not just to be safe, having some understanding of multi-threaded buffering, I would recommend going with two of a kind. You get a good price break when buying 2-3 at a time too.
The 32bit memory amount limit set by microsoft often translate in just 3Gb of usable ram. 512Mb and greater GPU cards ar mainstream for quite a while. That counts in the 4Gb limit too.
Thanks for the advice, I was leaning that way too, ram is not exactly expensive nowadays and it never hurts to have a bit more than you need : )
Ubuntu does these days, unless you have some really obscure hardware.
Ubuntu works and it is the primary OS I install on all my older relatives PCs just because it does not give me or them any trouble. Windows on the other hand... finding proper drivers for ten year old hardware sure is a treat! 
Upgrading a W2K laptop from 256MB to 8GB would be tremendously silly, and quite possibly not an easy feat.
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Upgrading a W2K laptop from 256MB to 8GB would be tremendously silly, and quite possibly not an easy feat.
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I doubt it would even support 2Gb memory at all, probably max is 1Gb. It has 2 banks for ram. I have never seen a single stick of SDR pc133 SODIMM ram. Might exist tho...
Very, very cool. Thanks! :)
I will admit that OS/2 isn't perfect but in many ways it was way ahead of its time. It always brings a smile to my face when I recognize a OS/2 system, like the ATMs at one of my bank's branches that I tend to use even though there are a dozen others in more convenient locations. The only reason I know those ATMs run OS/2 btw is that I personally know the guys responsible for maintaining them. I've yet to see a single crash, error message or anything unexpected.
I have been responsible for OS/2 in our company (about 800 employee). I'm still running few boxes with it. Some are still in production environment and most are virtulized now in VMWare. The sistem I was writing from is one of my old workstation I still use from time to time when I need to to something with networking as there are most common used services already included.
Nice to hear someone knows about it 
I do, and i have even used it but switched to Win 95 when available. Far worse OS but heavily supported. That was the OS/2 demise.
I just use IE browser, it is smooth to show the next picture, so I think it is lucky for me