Can my laptop RAM run in dual channel mode?

The specifications for my laptop says it has 1 additional ram expansion slot

if I choose to install a memory stick in there, will it work in dual chanel with the existing ram?

and, aside from having the ability to open tons of web browsing tabs, what are the benefits of having more ram or running it in dual channel?

As you said, you will be able to load more programs into ram, and also ram will work faster, but i doubt that you will see any performance increase without very specific tests, as ram is not the slowest part of pc anyway. But its worth increasing amount of ram - personaly i use newest dev version of chrome, and it sucks sooo much, i open 5-6 tabs and i run out of memory already - no other programs are running, my pc has 4 gb ram, so i feel like having 32mb of ram in 1990's .... As for dual channel support, you should check if your laptop model supports it, but i would say it must support it, as i have another low class laptop, it is 5+ years old, and even it supports dual channel ram, so i would say that almost every laptop should support it.

In normal circumstances Dual Channel is highly overrated, might make under 0.1% of overall speed, only benchmarks can show that. If you want to ad more RAM, find out exactly which RAM you have now and try too find same stick. That way you should get Dual channel automatically. (not that matters much).
Amount of RAM matters if you have habit of opening and running many programs. About minimum would be 1GB per processor core with most economical at 2GB per core. With laptops and computers using integrated graphics, some of RAM get's used for that so total usable RAM gets even lower.
Another plus for more RAM is that memory will not get paged to disk as much, so it will speed things up considerably if you are short om memory space.
Windows 8 uses RAM a bit more than W7, keeps more of file necessary to run system (64 bit version even more than 32bit) and so speeds system up somewhat. With 8GB I can safely use windows without Page file at all, so no unnecessary disk access.

thank you basher and count mike for your answers

I was just curious on how much speed one can squeeze out in a system, then I read about dual channel somewhere

currently with the programs that I use, I experienced filling up 4GB only once. Things froze for a second then ram usage dropped to about 50%. Is that the page file in action?

but if I wanted more speed then upgrading to a faster hard drive or SSDs would be the answer correct?

Notme said:

thank you basher and count mike for your answers

I was just curious on how much speed one can squeeze out in a system, then I read about dual channel somewhere

currently with the programs that I use, I experienced filling up 4GB only once. Things froze for a second then ram usage dropped to about 50%. Is that the page file in action?

but if I wanted more speed then upgrading to a faster hard drive or SSDs would be the answer correct?

Click to expand...

In short, both. SSD and RAM. Both have their own advantages but an SSD can also help with SF being faster. If you don't have problems with 4GB RAM I'd go for an SSD first, transformation is unbelievable.