More RAM? or More Speed?

I've been wondering about this for a long time now: Does having more slower RAM make your PC faster than less but faster RAM? I never had to deal with this question until today because I used to have an MSI K7T Turbo so I was pretty much stuck with slow PC133 SDRAM. I had 384 MB of it. Today I got myself an ECS K7S6A (cheap and good). But I don't have much money right now so could only afford to buy a 128 MB DDR-RAM stick. I'll get more later. Now is my system any faster than my old SDRAM based system ot is ir slower because I have less RAM? I'm running Windows XP.

You'll probably be a bit slower, at least when you need lots of ram. Your desktop might be a little faster, but WinXP is gonna eat up your 128, not leaving much for applications. Your first upgrade should be a 256MB stick. Until then you might want to consider an older, less greedy OS.

They used to say that the DDR upgrade was only for about 10% performance boost, probably a bit more now that the kinks are (mostly) worked out.

i think you're right but so far XP feels the same. Even a little bit faster. I know that I need more RAM but for this month this is all that I can get. Every PC these days needs at least 128 MB minimum(really the least i mean), ok with 256 MB and great with 512 MB. So far I feel that the speed has compensated for the lack of memory.