Hi, when I bought my last puter I looked for an all dancing all singing model. 3.9ghz and the largest ram was 512mb and was advised to have this. Now I'm looking for a laptop and seen a hp with 2gb of ram. Its not really a long time since I bought the home computer, but 512 to 2gb seems a big jump. Is 2gb overkill? And is there anything to know about large ram and xp (I would like something to handle anything now and to come, streaming and an upgrade of os.)

512MB of RAM is a little small IMO. I say go for around 1GB to 2GB of RAM.

512MB RAM is fine if you are just using your computer for surfing, word processing, playing old games (as long as graphics card is OK) and small amounts of picture/video editing.

With Windows XP and now with Vista on it's way, it would be better going up to at least 1GB RAM.

You might also want to pay attention to the graphics card as well. The better the card, the better your PC will cope with all the above

One other thing to note, is the number of RAM expansion slots. You may well wish to upgrade in the future, and it's wise to make sure you've got the slots to do it. A couple of extra dollars invested now for a single chip instead of two might be well worth looking at.