Thanks to the friendly guys at RDC Computers (boo Material Computers, who just turned their backs and said that they don't have it), I've upgraded the memory on my laptop. Now things have really started to fly. Before I only had 512 MB of RAM (which had to be shared with the onboard video card), but now I have a really cool 1.5 GB of RAM. I didn't want to go higher (to 2 GB) because I'm thinking that the 1.5 GB will be enough for what I'm doing (mostly programming) and there's no point of over-investing in this laptop (an HP Compaq NX 6125) which I'll probably replace in a year or two (if it won't fall to pieces in the meantime).

I couldn't be happier, there's a big difference in long term responsiveness of applications, especially as my workspace consists of KDE, Eclipse and Zope (2 & 3).