Thank you, that was the answer I was looking for. I will have to look into the usage. This was an upgrade on an old dell that had 256 running XP - didn't even know it was possible, thought it was gonna be a 512 stick in there. (but we had a lappy that was running XP on 128 so go figure - but it almost crapped itself, pardon my language). Anyway, we picked up the 1gb stick pretty cheap, its old PC3200, not as readily available, so was a little pricier than we had hoped. This is a computer for my brother in law, so I was just getting it to run a little better. I think the 1gb then will be the way I go, I will take out the 256 stick when I go see them this weekend.
thank you again for you fast and responsive answer!