Winamp memory consumtion?

hi all,
OK, a client owns a "nudie" club so he uses a slow laptop w/XP and Winamp to store a song collection of 5000 mp3 files. He then simply outputs the playback through the club's sound-system. On to my question
I would like to know, since all the music files combined total over 20Gb, is it going to make a difference installling 512Mb of RAM as opposed to 1Gb? I mean, the program can't obviously load all your music files into the system memory to start off with plus you're only playing a track at a time and there may be ~20 songs in que(i know this is spelled incorrectly, forgive me)
Lastly, this laptop will be replaced by a desktop system, hence the reason for the RAM size question and because i don't know anything about Winamp or working w/ lg. song file collections. Ohhh, i almost forgot, 256Mb is the amount of RAM on the laptop along w/ a 1.3GHz Celeron cpu. SLOOOOWWWWWWW!

PS the system isn't going to be used for any encoding.......just playing back tunes.

thanks so much for anybody's advice!
slicey

Thats more than fine. The amount of mp3's on teh hard drive does not affect performance at all, unless its all fragmented. But that's another issue. I used winamp on my Pentium 1 @ 200 megabitches, with 64 megabitches of ram and 4 megabitches of video and it ran perfectly fine.

winamp uses (/me checks) 15-20 megs of ram for me with the visualization window open/closed so you should be fine with even 64 mb of ram (not on windows xp though).

I am t3h m007

i would think both your setups would be slower still. about the fragmented HDD comment-that may definately be why the laptop is soooooo slowwwwwww. there's only 3-4% of unused space left and it's been that way for 4+ months! so, no go on a defrag. arghhhhh