Upgrade Processor or upgrade RAM?

In consideration of buying a new laptop, which of the following will give me better performance running Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash simultaneously?

1) Upgrading the process from "Intel Core2 Duo Processor T7100 (1.8 GHz and 2MB of L2 Cache)" to "T7700 (2.4 GHz and 4MB of L2 Cache).

or

2) Upgrading from 2GB of RAM to 4GB of RAM.

That is actually a very good question. I really don't think adding 4Gb of memory would solve too much. For the most part - very rarely will you find a mobile workstation that will support a full 4Gb of memory. Even then, if you are running a 32bit OS, you are really only going to get use out of ~ 3 - 3.5Gb. If you are running Vista - don't. Plain and Simple.

For a laptop the best thing would be get the T7700 with a 7200rpm hard-drive and 2Gb of ram. Blow away the preloaded OS and load up a nice clean install of Windows XP Pro SP2. Keep the OS install clean and tidy and keep that hard-drive defragged with the 2GB of memory and you should be a little better.

YMMV. But in my own humble opinion - you are better off with the faster proc, fast hdd and a clean OS than with just shoving more memory which you may not even be able to use in the first place.

My Lenovo Thinkpad Widescreen T60p 8741-C3U I upgraded to 4GB of memory and I see only 3Gb in Windows. The BIOS reports 4Gb - but Windows only recognized 3Gb. Linux sees al 4Gb.

But check your RAM and Pagefile usage with all three running - if they are sucking up 1.98Gb of memory and your pagefile is maxed out than yeah - you may want to get 3Gb for the laptop.

were you using Photoshop or things like that and always deal with giant TIFF files, of course you should upgrade your RAM, but if you only process some jpg shot with a 1000MEGAPIX DC (or so), such large RAM wont help. So, if you want to choose one, upgrade processor 1st.

Keep in mind that rendering images, especially large, complex ones, is a processor-intensive task. With 2GB of RAM already there, you will get a much greater performance increase from the higher clock speed.

Very interesting. Thanks for the feedback. Yes, it is very hard to find laptops with 4GB of RAM off the shelf.

I'd go with the RAM, Macromedia used to recomend doubling the minimum required RAM in the system if more than one of their applications was going to be running simultaneously.
They never mentioned anything about upgrading processing power in that situation.

After reading some of the other replies, maybe going with 3Gig for RAM & saving a few bucks for the next hardware upgrade could be an option.

I agree. It seems simple enough. Go for a more intense processor on a laptop that has the ability to add more RAM. That way its a win-win. You can upgrade the processor now, and then later if you feel the need, add more RAM.

I would go go for the faster processor

you could always save up more and do both ;p

build a nice core2 duo desktop system with 3 gigs of ram and a 2.4 gig cpu. laptops were never intended for that kind of high demand use. and upgrading either or both will likely cut your battery life down to around 75 minutes which is just plain retarded.

I suggest the processor, but you will not have any battery life, like mentioned above.