About to make a purchase, question about upgrading HD/RAM

I'll be purchasing a HP Pavilion dv2000t for college in the next couple of days. I was wondering if upgrading the RAM (1GB) and the HD (120GB) myself from Newegg would void the warranty? If so, I was curious to know it's worth it or it's better to just upgrade it directly on the site.

Here are the upgrades I'm planning from Newegg.com:

HitachiTravelstar 120GB 5400rpm

Corsair 1GB 200-pin DDR2 667

Btw, is that RAM compatible with the notebook? I wasn't too sure.

My FAQ filled out.

 

120 GB harddrive - why so astronomically large? Isn't like 60 GB more than plenty? Are you going to store a whole wackload of movies or something? At 2-3GB per movie (or internet download 700MB per movie), you can already store tons of movies on a plain 60 giger...
The way I see it, the larger the drive, the more you lose if (when) the harddrive crashses - oh, and there *is* a chance of it crashing one day - believe you me !

Ram 1GB, that's ok. I don't think it'll void the warranty. Just be carefull when you unscrew the screws not to scratch anything, including the screw itself. That way, you can remove the added memory chip and noone will know a thing...

 

I have an HP dv6000z and am planning on upgrading the RAM and HDD as well. I got the computer a month ago and intentionally got a smaller hard drive and less RAM than I really wanted. Computer assemblers such as HP make a lot of money on memory and hard drives. I would spend as little as possible on those two components from HP and upgrade them yourself. Don't hesitate to email your question about the warranty to an HP technician. I asked a lot of questions before I bought, and every question was answered within an hour. The site says that it comes with 400mhz memory, so I'd also check to see if 667mhz will work...it probably will, but it's best to have it in writing. You can sell the original stick of memory and use the 40GB hard drive as a spare external if you buy a case for it...or just sell it too.
Okay, there's my two cents.

 

in general...

ram, hd, minipci cards are considered user upgradeable and do not void your warranty. you will not receive any support from HP for the parts that you have upgraded and if HP determines that a part you upgraded is responsible for damage to parts that normally would be warranted, they will not honor that either.

however, that's just the legal mumbo jumbo and you should consider it a warning as, like i said above, those things are considered user upgradeable.

again, this is 'in general' so for you specifically, things may be different, you should check your HP warranty to be sure

 

Astronomical? I have 550GB total, and I'm constantly short on disk space...

 

What the heck do you do with that much space. That's an insanely * h u g e * amount. Half a terrabyte.

A downloaded movie takes, what, 3/4 of a gig. Ok, let it be a gig. You store like 500 of those movies? Do you have time to watch all that? If your drive crashes you lose all 500 movies - ouch! Do you make backups? You'd need more than a 100 dvd's and a *lot* of time, especially if you verify the dvd backups - because dvd's do NOT always burn 100%.

 

I have three quarters of a terabyte in my media machine. Still not enough (but mine are in a RAID array). But the media isn't that important. Why back it up? It's just a local "cache", that you can access faster than downloading from a network.
Also, I play games, and keep disc images on my computer for use with Alcohol so I don't have to cart the discs with me all the time. I have around 4GB of disc images alone.

 

It's not just for storing movies. Sometimes it's helpful to have storage space. Why not have 20-60 gb free?? It doesn't hurt anything. That way, if you need it, you don't need to look elsewhere. Some games take up 5gb of space, windows takes up 8-10, and depending on your music collection (LEGAL, of course, mine's about 15gb of life-long collecting) you're already at 30. Put on a few programs, especially suites like Adobe's or Office, and you bump that up quite a bit.

Why not back up a DVD so you can watch it on the road or in the hospital (hopefully not the hospital)...make that two.

You get my idea. I have a 100gb hard drive. It didn't cost a whole lot, and I like having the space. I have a permanent backup partition of 35gb. My XP partition is 65, but I recently merged it with a 15gb Vista partition (didn't use it at all). If you're into organization, more space gives you opportunities.

 

The new Apple MacPro can hold 2 terabytes (2,000 gigabytes)

 

Well, one example could be for backup, because it's cheaper, easier, safer and faster to back up to a separate harddrive than to DVD's.
In fact, I would do that if I had enough disk space. But I don't.
But if I were to back up everything, I'd only have 275GB of effective disk space.

What I use it for:
Games (~70GB)
Programs (~10GB)
Movies (~25 GB)
Backups of various stuff (~30GB)
Music (~10GB)
ISO files (~70GB)
Unsorted downloads (bittorrent, regular browser download and whatever else) (~25GB)
Programming-related stuff (own projects, api's and libraries) (~5GB)
And then two installations of Windows, plus all the misc. stuff that creeps in.

Actually, I was wrong, I do have some free space. Currently 120GB free on Windows, and a further 110GB unpartitioned (Used to have a couple of linux partitions, but haven't recreated them yet, so just have the space unpartitioned for future expansion )
Besides, I did some major housecleaning recently to clear up some disk space.

But I sure wouldn't go below my current amount of disk space.

 

I think it depends what you are doing, I don't consider that amount of space very large, it's big, but not huge.

Currently I have about 600GB of space, about 400GB of it taken up with various things, programs, backups, raw video files (each hour of raw video takes about 12GB or so of space, if you've never done raw video editing, well... it needs LOTS OF SPACE), compiled video files in various formats for CD's, DVD's, web streaming etc, some TV shows I've not yet watched, backups of some TV shows I have watched but want to keep around and watch again, my entire CD collection ripped to MP3 (about 40GB worth of music) the list goes on, and I'm fairly careful about not collecting lots of stuff I don't need.

 

Well I also store TV shows too sometimes they run 26-40+ eps depending. Usually they're good quality so it's around 700mb an ep. Gotta keep in mind I'm a college student so I don't have time to always burn them onto a DVD for storage. I just like having lotta space.

 

What's eps?

Perhaps real time recording from TV isn't as good as the higher grade dvd-like mpeg? When I convert a movie from my camcorder to a dvd, the conversion is slower than real time.

I reccon that a good tv recording program would buffer semi-compressed data on disks, while trying to catch up in the background while compressing proper mpeg file.
(screw wmv).

 

Okay I think I just have only 2 questions left before I make the purchase.

1) I read some of the clean reinstallation guides out there. Didn't seem too complicated. So all I do once I install my new HD and RAM is install Win XP Pro and follow the guides afterwards, correct?

2) Is it a better idea to buy from Costco.com or directly from HP.com? I don't know much about Costco's 180-day return policy although I read it, I think people that have had experience could tell me better, but it is bout $73 more expensive (although I'd be willing to drop that much if the 180-day is really that good). Costco also uses FedEx so shipping might be faster I'm assuming?

 

I was referring to downloads where people already did the video encoding and stuff like that etc. I dunno they're just really big files. A whole season 24 took up around 14.8GB on my desktop

 

an "ep" is an episode. 26-40 episodes for TV shows. And what TV recording usually does is just dumps the stream nearly raw to the disk. It's faster because it doesn't crank on the processor, but it takes up ginormous amounts of disk space. I usually re-encode later, but initial recording is pretty heavy on the disk usage.