Acer Ferrari 5000 Upgrades

Hello,

I purchased an Acer Ferrari 5000 about a couple months ago and so far so good.

I have just ordered a 2GB RAM DIMM from Kingston which will bring me up to 3GB of RAM, which should allow me to completely remove the pagefile with no low memory issues while playing games. I may replace the other DIMM with another 2GB if I decide in the future to install Vista Ultimate 64-bit.

I am now looking at replacing the 5400RPM drive with a 7200RPM drive and I am looking at the Seagate Momentus 7200.2 drive. The Momentus drive is SATA-300 and the laptop's interface is SATA-150, will the drive run fine using the slower interface? Anyone else upgrade their HDs and have any suggestions?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

Even though you now have 3Gb of ram you should not turn off the pagefile, alot of computer users believe that if they have lots of ram then you can turn off the page file, this is nothing but a myth.

Being that you have 3Gb of ram now you could if running XP safely turn your page file down to around 1Gb with a max of about 1.5Gb, if you turn it off or turn it down too low windows will warn you that you are running out of virtual memory and automatically increase it on its own.

 

Thanks for the quick response.

As far as running without a pagefile goes I am not too sure if you have tried removing the pagefile yourself, but I can assure you that you do get increased performance.

I have tried playing several games and they load quite a bit quicker not having to cache data to the pagefile on the hard drive and instead run strictly from memory. And I have tested this on the same machine both with and without a pagefile and I have seen the difference.

Now, not to say that you are completely wrong because I am sure there are apps and some circumstances which you need a pagfile but in most circumstances you can most definitely run without one. You will typically get a warning letting you know you Windows may not be able to create dump files on a system crash without a pagefile, but that is most likely un-important.

As far as the hard drive upgrade goes, has anyone replaced the standard drive in their Acer Ferrari's?

Thanks again.

 

Its simple enough, if possible i would clone your current drive and then copy the data to your new drive, bearing in mind you will need to recreate all of the partitions including PQSERVICE (i believe there are many threads related to this in the forum); this will ensure that your unit will offer all of the recovery functions it does now. Installing the new drive should pose no problems at all; all sata drives are backwards compatible but you may need to set the transfer rate on your chosen drive so that it matches the supported rate of your mainboard.

 

clevins,

I'm considering getting the Ferrari 5000 and I would also like to get the Seagate momentus 7200.2 160GB. Have you done this upgrade? if yes did it work?

 

i can assure you that the upgrade will work absolutely fine; i saw an old travelmate 2400 running one of these hard drives without any problems.

 

OK...so...I just removed a 1GB DIMM and installed a new 2GB DIMM which brought me to 3GB RAM, but 32-bit Vista is only showing 2.5GB RAM??? Any ideas???

 

There's a registry switch that'll let the rest of the memory show up; although i dont know what that is at the moment, i would try googling it