I now have 4.5meg broadband, having gradually upgraded from 1meg to 2 meg then to 4.5. I am generally happy with my PC but cant honestly say that i have noticed much improvement in browsing speed since the last upgrade. I have 128meg Ram. would it help to increase by the same again?
thanks.

generally browsing speed doesnt change that much with the 4.5meg broadband. i believe that usually affects your download speed. and RAM wouldn't change much in the browsing speed as well. since Web Browsers require little ram unless you are running alot of plugins at once.

can you be more specific?

and generally, unless your Internet Explorer or whatever browser you use hangs halfway, it isn't a RAM issue.

and like i said, the speed of your broadband mostly affects your download and upload speed. not so much on browsing.

With XP, 128MB RAM is bear minimum and you would be choking the system.

Like a drag race with only a pint of fuel in your drag.

Your computer overall speed, and speed of every action, even opening any application such as IE, will need RAM and CPU mainly. You'll see ALOT of improvement in everything if you were to upgrade to 512Mb and I certainly would recommend it straight away.

With IE download and upload speed, 4.5Mbit/s connection is download. Your upload is probably 512Kbit/s or something lower most likely. That would making uploading anything pretty slow but downloading would be pretty fast and so would internet speed.

8Bit = 1Byte

So your download would be a maximum of 562Kbyte/s. Most net connections work at a threshold of 80% of the ad value, on average, so you would be getting 450Kbyte/s download.

Not fast, but not slow either.

http://www.internetfrog.com/mypc/speedtest/ <<try this, it tells you your upload and download speeds... 256mb RAM would be a reasonable amound to run windows, browse the net and run a word processor.

I would recomend 512mb if you do more than this

for gaming (3D games) i would recomend 1-2GB