buying 15" pb, some questions

I would get more RAM, but not from apple.
Get ONE 512 mb stick from apple and buy another 512 mb..

I'm not sure about the respons time.
(the 12 incher feels like a 25ms, with slightly ghosting..)

The battery in the 15-inch issn't the best.
I think you'll get 3:30 with webrowsing and some other light weigth apps.
For gaming, less. It the games are heavy 3d actions you'll probably won't reach 2:00..

I don't own a 15-inch myself (but i know many who has), i've got a 12-incher (which has a slightly better battery).

The reason people get a single stick of RAM is to be able to put more ram in the computer. There is no performance increase for having RAM in a single stick.

For example, if you buy with just 512 MB in the computer, spread over 2 DIMMS, then when you upgrade the RAM, you have to remove one of the DIMMs, "losing" 256 MB. That's why a lot of people buy it with 1 512 MB DIMM. Then they buy an upgrade from Crucial or some other discount RAM shop.

Since a 512 stick is $109 from Crucial, it makes the most sense to buy your computer with just a single 512 stick. Another way to go might be to buy your computer with the standard configuration of 2 256 MB sticks, then buy 2 512 sticks from Crucial and eBay the 256 MB sticks. If you can sell them for more than $9, you've made money on the deal.

Another option...

A 15" 1.5mhz PowerBook with 1 512MB SODIMM costs $100 more than 2X256 if you get the PowerBook BTO.

At Outpost.com, a 512MB PC2700 SO-DIMM costs $99.99. A 1GB PC2700 SO-DIMM costs $179.

If you get the 1 SODIMM solution, it's a $100 option, then it costs an additional $99.99 to upgrade to 1GB - a total of $198.00 and you end up with 1GB. On the other hand, if you get the default 2X256 solution "free" from Apple, you can buy the 1GB SO-DIMM from Outpost for $179, yank out one of the 256MB SO-DIMMs, install the 1GB in its place, and end up with 1.25GB for $20 less.

I have a 1.25mhz 15" with 1.25GB of RAM in the configuration I described above. It works very, very nicely.

Get the battery. You can get 3:30 out of it -- if you turn down the brightness, turn off airport, etc. My experience is that you end up getting around 2 hours out of the battery with "normal" use, so it's nice to have another battery around. The single-stick SO-DIMM option, on the other hand, is a waste of money as a $100 option.

I don't know what the response time is -- Apple doesn't seem to have it in the tech specs. My subjective opinion is "pretty good compared with other TFT displays I've seen."

I have a RAM question.

I've felt that OSX has felt a little sluggish at times. For example, opening up System Preferences from the dock takes a few seconds, and navigating around System Preferences causes little lags whenever going from each section to the next. Also, GarageBand sometimes chokes and says there are too many tracks and gets quite laggy.

Would adding more RAM fix these things, or is this more to do with the processor speed and FSB? I'm currently sitting at 2 sticks of 256 MB (standard Apple memory), and I was thinking of getting a 1 GB stick, to boost it up to 1.256 MB of RAM. Do you think I'd definitely see noticable speed improvements by doing this?