I don't know what you're planning to do with your laptop but whatever it is it will most likely not benefit from having over 4GB of ram. Use the money and get a SSD.
honestly if i was going to throw 8 gig of ram into anything it would be a desktop/workstation, i wouldnt bother with the laptop with that much system memory. hell with that much system memory you might consider disabling the page file
Not really. You really only need that much RAM nowadays only if you are running big video editing programs and such. Buy the RAM 5-8 years from now, I say. It will be worth it then.
I vote for SSD. That is the speed bottleneck remover.