Upgrade questions for laptop

[russell_314]

I would like some advice on upgrades for my wife's Sony Vaio laptop. She uses it for web browsing, listening to music on itunes, messenger, etc. No games or anything too heavy but she will open MANY programs at once. She will have one IE window open with maybe 10-15 tabs and then have Yahoo messenger, AIM, MSN messenger open. Right out of the box I upgraded the RAM to 2GB's and removed most of the junk programs bundled with it. I also used msconfig to limit startup items, defraged and all the common stuff to give it a little boost.

Should I consider going from 2GB's of RAM to 4GB's? I've been told that after 2GB's I wouldn't really notice much of performance increase.

How about upgrading to a 7200 RPM drive. I know it might cause some loss in battery life but would this give a noticeable performance boost?

Lastly I thought about "downgrading" to XP. Vista is cool but I don't think anyone can argue it uses more resources. How hard would this be?

I know my upgrade options are limited since it's a laptop but if I'm overlooking something I could do let me know

Specs
Model: SONY VAIO VGN-FZ190N4
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0G
GPU:NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT
HDD: 120GB 54000 RPM SATA
RAM: 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 667
Operating System: Windows Vista Business

This is a link to the model
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834117508

This is the memory I installed
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231116

 

[Justin]

weird. you did all that and have 2gb's of RAM and it's still slow? upping the RAM to 4gb would be the best choice if she has a lot apps running. and that should be fast already, even when you have Vista installed.