Question - What to upgrade

[Ughmahedhurtz]

If I were to buy 2gb of dual-channel DDR2 ram and put it in along with the currently-existing/used 2gb dual-channel DDR2 ram, and I run XP Pro 32bit, even though it REPORTS 3.xx, will I still get the running BENEFIT of 4gb?

Short version: no. Programs cannot allocate anything outside of what Windows shows as "available." So you'd start paging to disk about time you hit 3.2GB of used RAM, just like if you only had 3.2GB of physical RAM installed.

Would it be a more-noticeable increase than simply adding a 3rd gb?

Not really. You'd get some slight benefit but you'd probably not even notice during normal usage. Unless you started running 5 accounts.

Will I have to go through any bullshit besides simply sticking the ram in if I do go the 4gb route?

Nope. Not unless you want to upgrade to XP/Vista 64bit. Note that you should always put your RAM in matching banks for DDR2/DDR3.
Example: say you have two Kingston HyperX (hereafter "H") and two crucial ballistix (hereafter "B"). When you look on your mobo, you'll have 4 slots labeleb 0 through 3 (or 1 through 4). You'll wanna put 'em in like so:

BANK0 -- BANK1 -- BANK2 -- BANK3
---H-------B--------H-------B