Upgrading RAM

Well, I'm thinking of upgrading my laptop's RAM. It's a fairly old laptop (going on 3 years this august) and I'm going to be buying a Desktop in about 1-2 years.

I've deduced that my laptop will not support DDR3 RAM and currently has a 1GB (single-channel) stick of Corsair RAM.

Now my question for you is since I'm running a 32-bit OS (WindowsXP) my lappy will only recognize 3GB of it, correct? If this is the case, would it be better to go for 2x2GB sticks of Dual-Channel RAM or just 1 stick?

I've been looking at this pair of sticks & am wondering if I'm making a good decision (I trust my guildies but hey, you never know )
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145193

Is the benefit of dual-channel vs single channel enough to warrant the cost of an extra stick?

your laptop should recognize 3.2 -3.5GB of RAM - in either case having 4GB in there won't hurt it. You are almost always best of to have identical sticks of RAM installed so I would go with the RAM that you have in the link above.

One more question, with the added RAM, will my laptop get any hotter? Will I possibly need to purchase a cooling pad for it? Right now my average CPU temperature is 55Celsius, I'm pretty sure that's an okay temperature, but I'm not sure if it will get any hotter with the extra RAM

no, additional RAM won't cause your system to heat up. at least, not enough for you to notice.

Consider going Win7 64-bit, for both performance and security reasons.

Also check whether your machine is DDR or DDR2.

My machine is DDR2 Compatible because it already has a DDR PC2-5300 1GB ram stick in it, which is DDR2 according to this scan by CPU-Z:

The RAM you have selected is good - I have the exact same DIMMs installed in my laptop and it gave it a noticeable boost (2gb originally) in Vista.

Okay good stuff, will be getting a credit card either today or tomorrow and buying these sticks then