What are you planing to use the laptop for?
If you are going to use it for video/advance photo editing, playing 3D games or use design software such as Photoshop or AutoCAD
and if your laptop has a real proper graphics card with dedicated graphics memory from Nvidia or ATI, then maybe upgrading to 8GB of RAM would be a good idea, however, based on the processor and
preinstalled RAM, I find it very likely you only have a Intel graphics chip, which doesnt have dedicated graphics memory.
If all you will use it for is solitaire, MS office and surfing the web, what you have will be sufficient, dont waste any money upgrading this laptop. Or maybe go for 4GB, (3GB usable) with your current Windows 7 32-bit OS.
If you want to do some more graphics heavy stuff like mentioned above, buy a better laptop with a I5-7 CPU/Xeon and a dedicated graphics card. This will come with a minimum of 4GB RAM generally.
When buying new RAM for a laptop, always open up the laptop first and make sure you know what you have, just in case it turns out you have 2 1GB modules and not 1 2GB module as you expect. Also, on some laptops its so hard to get to the RAM slots that its
a bit risky to even do it yourself, but HP is usually good and make it very easily accessible. You probably know this, but you want 2 of the same size RAM modules preferably.
www.kingston.com amongst others also have a Memory Search function, just put in your computers make a model and it will tell you a product ID you search for a reseller.
