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    Got my HDD, I need RAM now for 3201xci

    Discussion in 'Acer' started by bonedages, Nov 21, 2004.

  1. bonedages

    bonedages Notebook Enthusiast

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    I ended up purchasing the 7200rpm Hitachi travelstar. First and foremost, I would like to thank everyone who helped me with my decision from my previous post; I don’t regret buying the hard drive! Switching from a 4200 rpm to a 7200 rpm made a positive speed increase to my machines performance. On the other hand however, I am still not content with the speed of my machine. So I am thinking of upgrading my laptop memory and adding an extra 1028mb. Are there any good recommendations for different brands? And/or what type? Price is always an issue for me. Nevertheless, I don't want to miss out on a good deal due to my greediness. As a result I am looking for the best bang for my buck to upgrade my system ram. I am also interested in knowing, will it make a noticeable increase in my laptop performance? (I am an avid gamer who is not content with playing doom3 at the medium setting)

    Thanks in advance

     
    bonedages, Nov 21, 2004
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  2. Excavator

    Excavator Notebook Enthusiast

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    I just upgraded my hard drive too. Got the same drive as you did it sounds like.
    The speed increase I've gotten comes from the new 7200RPM drive, the fresh install of XP pro and formatting from the start with the NTFS file system. Definitely worth the money.

    As for memory, I know from a previous post of yours that you have 512meg already, if you jump up to 1GB I don't think you'll notice near the improvement that your hard drive made.
    Google "Point of diminishing return"
     
    Excavator, Nov 21, 2004
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  3. Venombite

    Venombite Notebook Virtuoso

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    Bonedages,

    From some of my other posts, I indicated the bottlenecks for games.

    1. GPU
    2. RAM
    3. HDD
    4. CPU

    Now that you've upgraded the HDD, the ammount/speed of the ram will help. Upgrading the CPU will also help. Checkout eBay, there's a lot of people selling faster Pentium M Dothan CPU for decent prices.

    The speed issue could also be limited bt the display drivers or even your OS load. Try loading from scratch and install only what you need. This may help.

    -Vb-
     
    Venombite, Nov 21, 2004
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  4. bonedages

    bonedages Notebook Enthusiast

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    Thanks for the advice venombite,
    Personally, i don't think it would be a good investment for upgrading my cpu. 1.5 really isn't too big of a speend increase compared to a 2.0 dothan. You said it yourself, cpu would be the last on the list for maximizing gaming productivity. Therefore, back to my original thread, i'm buy ram. (not cpu)
     
    bonedages, Nov 21, 2004
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