I did a little looking around online and I think I can upgrade my Compaq Presario 710US, getting a noticeable performance boost without spending too much money. The box has a 1 GHz AMD Duron CPU, which is fast enough for my needs.
The first thing it needs is more RAM. It should cost me about $80 to get a 256 MB SODIMM from Kingston to bring the total system RAM up to 512 MB, which is the most the laptop will take. For about the same amount of money, I can get a new, larger 5400 RPM hard drive from NewEgg. The current drive is 20GB, which if I setup a dual boot system (XP and Linux), realistically means I have to split it into two 10 GB partitions. That's too small. If get even just a 40 GB 5400 RPM drive, not only will disk I/O dramatically improve, I can devote 20 GB to each OS. This in turn would allow me to rely on the box as my primary PC and redo Gondor for Judith. (Gondor has a 15 GB drive and I'm only using a bit more than half.)
I need to think on this.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment