should i upgrade?

currently i am running 1gb of pc 3500. thinking about upgrading to 2gb of pc 3200 ram and then giving my ram to my pops. however. i am also planning on building a new rig as this one is about 3-4 years old. is it worth the upgrade? i do plan on keeping my current set up for a possible pvr/back up pc build.

Why upgrade if you're planning on a new build? Aside from having tons more storage than what you have listed in your signature, that system is spec'd a little better than my HTPC.

On Win XP, overall you will see very little or no gain moving from 1GB to 2 GB RAM on most games and contemporary applications. There are serveral articles that shows the performance differences with the move from 1 GB to 2GB. IT's surprising to see that some games and apps actually decrease in performance with the 2 GB. Apps like nero actually loose 40% in performance. Just do a search and I'm sure you'll fine the artical. Overall, 1GB of memory is more than enough for contemporary applications and most games.

With Vista, this may change since Vista seems to be more memory hungry over XP.

I would agree with the other 1 gig is enough. save your coin for the new rig

I have never played a game that has decreased in performance from having more ram. In fact every game I have played has seen increased performance, sometimes small sometimes large by having 2gb of memory.

Anyway, if you are building a new machine there is no point to upgrade your current one.

Well... Not all apps and games are affected. There are a few selected games and apps does have a good increases. Games like FEAR and BF2 will have a huge increase while some others will have a very minor increase and decrease. Biggest decrease in performance is in the apps. A few apps have as much as 50% to 60% decrease. But overall for most games and apps, it offers very little gain (if any).

Something doesnt sound right there. What apps lose 50 - 60% performance from going to 2gb memory?

Spending your cash on DDR1 now is probably not the wisest investment, also higher density ram tends not to run as tight a latency as lower density, so you may be giving up some timings to go bigger.