Can someone please tell me what advantages can i have from upgrading my PC133 SDRAM to PC 2100 DDR RAM? My motherboard only like PC2100 the most. Is it woth upgrading my RAM? I notice that start menu in Windows XP take a second to popup and the menu goes blank first and the program's icon appear in a short while is this because of my RAM? Thank in advance.

DDR ram is still SDRam, it just sends data twice per second. so pc2100 ram is still running at 133mhz, it just seems like 266. try sisoft sandra and benchmark your memory against ddr ram.

meg for meg you should see a fairly dramatic improvement in system performance using DDR2100 over SDR because it runs twice as fast... a modern motherboard will be more likely to support DDR than SDR too.

Will it solve the menu problem?

if you were going to update your ram, then i would go and get (ddr400) pc3200 256mb ($50) its not much more with ram prices so low now. if your mother board doesnt support it then just wait a little longer and save some cash and get an nforce2 ($90) kt400 ($80) you wont see that much improvement over pc133 if you were really strapped for cash just get 512pc133 if you havent already.. you should see some improvement...

theoretically DDR can be over 2x faster than SDR, but unless you are using very memory intensive apps (ie, benchmarking), you usually only see a 10-20% increase.

it all depends on how much you are willing to spend, as ddr is 2x the price of sdr on average- 1gb of pc133 will do you /much/ better in the longrun than only 512mb of ddr400

XP caches icons in ram. the more ram other programs use, the more often this cache gets cleared. so every time you take 80/90% of your ram, expect XP to re-read the icons from disk. Solution: more ram

the menu problem is probably tour gfx adaptors problem.
try "Display properties/Settings/Advanced/Troubleshoot"
move the hardware accelereation slider one nudge to the left, apply and test your menus. move the slider back, apply and test again.

that solved the problem for me when i ran into it.

That is true and I would suggest that DDR ram is the best.