Advice on hard drive & memory upgrade

I have a Dell E6500 with P8400, Quadro 160M and Vista Ultimate.

I have a 80gb 7200rpm drive in it, and 2gb ddr2 800 in 1DIMM.

I use my laptop for movies, word processing and graphic design (mainly Photoshop and Indesign, some Illustrator).

Should I upgrade my memory to 4gb/3gb? what difference would I feel?

Should I upgrade my hard drive? (I have a 250GB external already)

If I move to XP, would I need the upgrade?

Thanks.

 

3GB is surely a good upgrade for your use. 4GB with Vista 64 even better.

What brand and type is your hard drive? (you can see the number in the device manager)

 

My laptop is still on it's way, so I can't check it out yet...

If I downgrade to XP, will the upgrade be needed? (I don't mind Vista, but I have two important (& expensive) programs that work only on XP...)

 

Speaking about Photoshop - what kind of Photoshop? Elements? VCS 3/4??

I've got Elements (came with my Vaio) and as far as I'm aware, unless you handle gigantic files 2GB are reasonable.
(about 440 to maybe 500MB for Photoshop)

Also - hobby or professional?
If professional you may want to upgrade - if hobby, wait a little while.

 

Have you tried compatebility mode through the installation assistant that is included in Vista?

I doubt you need an upgrade in XP.

 

I'm still studying graphic design and getting better all the time, but I am in the buisness already 3 years. Right niw I use CS3, and I'm planing to move up to CS4.
Those programs are special text database (a thousand books on a DVD with search options) programs, and do not work with anything but XP.
Maybe a XP emulator, but I don't know if something like that exists. Dual-boot is also an option, but I don't feel like doing it...

 

Well, its going to be professional then.
Photography is a bit of a hobby for me - especially since summer 08, see sig, but I only have photoshop elemnts 6.

I suppose a RAM upgrade is a good idea.
HDD upgrade - depends, I think not necessarily worthwhile, you may get some better loading times, but that's possibly it, I suspect...

Dual Booting is always an option - in fact, it may be better than downgrading only to XP...
Or again - have a good look at the compatebility mode.
I run SAS under Vista and Maple 9.5 ...
They aren't meant for Vista.
If you are studying, your university may have access to the MSDNA library - this'll give you free access to Vista Business.

SAS officially supports Vista Business only - but runs on home too....
But its meant for XP.

 

I would get another stick of RAM (preferably one with the same capacity as the first) in order to reap the benefits of dual-channel bandwidth. Having two sticks of RAM installed will probably consume more power though (I think it's about 1.5W per stick of RAM).

I wouldn't upgrade the hard drive unless you absolutely need the extra capacity. Otherwise, you'll need a high quality SSD to see any significant increase in performance. Personally, I would hold off on upgrading the hard drive for as long as possible in order to wait for SSD prices to drop to something a little more reasonable.

 

Well if the hard drive is a Seagate 7200.1 (or other brand of that generation) you would benefit a lot from an upgrade.

If it's Seagate 7200.3 (or other brand of that generation) there is no need to upgrade.

 

You can upgrade to 4GB, and use the unused RAM as a RAM disk. I've tried this with Gavotte's RAM Disk, and it works fine. You can use the available 3GB as physical memory for Windows, and the rest of the unused ~1GB for storing the pagefile and other temp files, etc.

As for the HDD, we need to know the model no. of the current drive.

 

upgrading the ram will make a huge difference. But I would just use the external harddrive. Keep moving all your big files off the computer harddrive.

 

Thanks for the help... once I get the laptop, I'll let you know the hard drive model. I'm defiantly getting another stick of 2GB ram...