Windows XP and upgrading, the effects?

[BobTheDinosaur]

i've always wondered, when u've got an existing windows installation and you add some hardware, like say some ram, do you need to reinstall windows? i know it'll still work without reinstalling but will there be any performance gain after reinstalling?
back when i still had a celery 700 with win98 and i upgraded just the cpu i found a massive performance increase after reinstalling windows
reason i'm asking is that i've got a laptop with windows xp running on it, all updated and nicely set up and stuff, it used to have 256MB ram then i added another 256MB but the performance increase i'm getting isn't very dramatic, fact i don't notice any improvement, should i reinstall?

thanks in advance!

[Dissolved]

well memory wont need a re-install.

the reason u didnt notice a high gain from 256 to 512, is that xp needs 1gb to run at its peak perforance, and you need a good cpu to use then gb of memory as well.

[AJF]

128 > 256 = Dramatic
256 > 512 = Noticeable, but not "dramatic"
512 > 1024 = Essentially all that XP needs to run smoothly for nearly every day-to-day use, with the exception of heavy gaming or applications that demand a lot of memory.

The speed of the memory is also a factor.