newbie questions pls help.

Hi and what a great site this is , i bought last week A ACER Aspire 3053 WXMI the box said its got a 60gb HHD,but when i looked in my computer ( O.S is windows xp.) its shows a 'c' drive with free space 17.2GB, total size 25.2 GB and another 'd' drive called 'acerdata' with free space 21.6 GB , total size 25.7 GB on it ,have i made a partion without knowing it? Because l'll soon fill up the c drive 17.2gb. 2- its got 512 mb ram , would upgrading to a gig help play games online a bit better , cause frame rate is poor?- or is it graphics chip /memory thats at fault? wireless connection runs at 54mbps- thanks in advance.

 

Hi, Martin! Welcome to the forums!
Acer's notebooks come from the factory partitioned that way - they include a recovery disc of your system on a hidden partition ( which you should burn to a DVD as soon as possible using eRecovery!), and split the remainder of disk space 50/50. Feel free to put your music, pictures, and videos on D: - should you need to use the Acer recovery DVD, it will only restore C: to a working state, and leave D: untouched.

As for the RAM issue, 512 MB is what I'd consider a fair amount for XP use. Not good, just fair. 1GB should help you in multitasking and improve your system's responsiveness, though. And with the prices of RAM as they are, there's almost no reason NOT to! It may not improve your gaming, though - the Radeon Xpress 1100 is a very basic card, in between an Intel GMA 900 and GMA 950 for performance.

 

thanks for your help..