Asus A7T is such a letdown. Is upgrade possible?

This was my first time buying a laptop that was supposed to have good gaming capabilities and I was real excited about it. I get the thing and it's rife with problems, including everything in the C drive being read only (why??). Another thing is that little icon that shows a network connection? Yeah, that always has an X through it, even though I'm clearly connected.

Anyways, it comes with a 1.8 gz cpu. 512mb graphics card, physx card, and 2 gb RAM... but 1.8 cpu. Which means I can't play anything new. So regardless of all the other problems, is there a way to fix this?

 

What do you mean can't play anything new? I'm assuming its a Core 2 Duo? 1.8ghz isn't slow at all, unless you're comparing it to the high end mobile processors. The differences between your CPU and taking a step up is marginal. The reason they're released like that is to get people to pay a premium so they can upgrade. Nobody wants to have the slowest one, and everyone thinks there are huge performance sacrifices. Its marketing. Yes there are some differences, but they are not severe. You can still play plenty of games. You're more limited by your GPU in this case than anything.

So first off i would try a format, then install new drivers. If that doesn't work, call tech support and have them figure it out.

 

No, It's an AMD Turion TL56. I don't know, I read something like Bioshocks reqs and it says 2.4gz minimum!

 

Well, the A7 is not a high end notebook by far, I guess you haven't done your research at all. 1.8ghz may be on the low end(though 1.6ghz is), but 1.8ghz-2.0ghz is the 'sweet spot' where the price erformance ratio is the best. Numbers mean nothing at all.

And you do know that, in gaming the GPU counts, not the processor?

 

Did you get the X1 or the A1?
The X1 looks like it has the turion x2 1.8ghz processor, but only 1gb of ram.
The A1 on the other hand, looks like a 2.0ghz processor and 2gb of ram.
Has a go7600 in it with 256mb (turbocache probably to 512mb) and I don't know of any laptops that have a physics card in it.

Either way it should still be able to play alot of games on it, not the newest ones on full settings, but thats a really hard goal even for the best of laptops.
Like Eugenics said, you might want to just reformat and reload the OS. Everything on the C: drive shouldn't be read-only thats pretty odd.

Edit: Wow 3 posts.
Bioshock says it wants: CPU - Pentium 4 2.4GHz Single Core processor
You have a 1.8 dual core, which is quite a hard working little processor, and exceeds the requirements. Pentium 4 processors are junk compared to Core 2s and the new turions

 

Oh, it came with only 1g ram but I upgraded that right from the beginning.

 

About the X thru the network connections...perhaps you have both the wireless and LAN connections turned on? You can only use one of those so disable the other one and maybe the X will go away.

 

You don't need to disable, if you will connect to the wireless then the wireless icon will change to an active state, and the LAN (wired) icon will still have the X because you're not connected to it.

Similarly for the other way around.

 

yes you can remove it from the taskbar

in XP : control panel -> network connection -> right click the connection you dont want to show, select properties, then uncheck the little square at one botton "notify me when this connection has limited or no connectivity". problem solved


gaming on a notebook.... sigh... I've been down that road before, there is a reason they still make desktop PC's.

Turion X2 is fine! great for multitasking.