Can I milk my laptop for 1.5 more years?

So I'd like to go to best buy, grab a new P6860FX and ride blissfully off into the sunset while conquering the galaxy or blowing up some Soviets in Seattle, but right out of college I decided to join the Peace Corps, so I went from poor to downright destitute. And, alas, my parents have shown no desire to help me with said purchase, so it looks like I'm stuck with my paleolithic Dell Inspiron 5150.

As it stands, my geriatric machine was bought in July 2003 and came with the following specs:
Pentium 4 3.06GHZ
512MB Ram
80GB HDD
Radeon Mobility 9000 64MB

My desire is to play some older games, and generally keep this beast running for the next 1.5 years, at which point I will finish my service (I do not have it with me right now, I am going home in a week for my sister's wedding and will pick it up then, before returning).

My father and I are planning to bump the ram to 1gb, possibly 2 depending on price. What I wish to ask is if people think it likely this laptop will continue to function for 1.5 years, and what steps I should take to ensure that end.

Additionally, I had it serviced at one point to replace the lcd, as it randomly stopped communicating with the computer. It was probably late 2006 this occurred.

For the gamers in the crowd- the games I'm going (hoping) to be playing are:
Rome: Total War gold edition
TESIII: Morrowind GOTY edition
Homeworld I and II
Galactic Civilizations II

Thank you for your help.

 

you will want to upgrade if you want to do any kind of light gaming. upgrade the rams even if you're not playing any games since they're dirt cheap these days. you'll probably have trouble running Rome and Morrowind. you may be able to play Homeworld 1 and 2 which are great games. Gal Civ i'm not so sure but it's unlikely you'll get smooth frame rate. in any case you'll experience lag in all of the mentioned games above unless you upgrade the ram.

 

If you wanna stretch, the RAM and maybe HDD are all you need. Plus keep HDD defragged and stop unneeded process's.

 

If you really want to stretch, you could also upgrade the video card to a geforce fx5200... it might be worth it....

 

the laptop have no problem living, use the advices above and just dont expect too much out of it. I still consider my P3 lenovo with 128mb and 20gb hd bought in 2000 living

 

I would suggest upgrading the ram and hard drive, especially the hard drive, i'm guessing the hard drive in that laptop is ide, if you see if you can pick up a Western Digital Scorpio 250gb 5400rpm drive. its 5400rpm but its pretty zippy. I've found with laptops having a fast hard drive makes the biggest difference. The laptop in my sig is quite old, but with a zippy hdd and 2gbs of ram it does just fine, you should be able to squeak another year out of it.

 

I don't know how much mobility you need, but I would think something smaller would be nicer to carry around in the Peace Corps. One option might be to sell what you got now to get something smaller. Though I wouldn't P4 notebooks are garnering much attention on eBay. Something like the HP nc6000 and/or ThinkPad T41/42 with the a ATI Raedon 9600 could probably be had on eBay in the $300-400 range which is much less than the Gateway and the 9600 is a good GPU for your games. Plus a Pentium M based notebook will get much better battery life than a P4. You wouldn't have a warranty, but that's no worse than you got now. Good Luck.

 

As ZaZ said, a Pentium M notebook would be a very good option. And actually upgrading DDR ram (PC2100 or PC2700) is quite expensive. Far more expensive then DDR2 ram. And the money put into extra ram and a new hdd would cost you at least half a T42...which has a much faster GPU then your current notebook and a far cooler running CPU.

@ZaZ...can you get a T42 with MR 9600??? I thought you get the X300? (or am I just confused) Either way the MR 9600 is an excellent GPU for its age.

 

My T42 had the 9600 so the answer to your question would be yes. I believe the T42 was offered with the Raedons 7500, 9000 and 9600. The X300 came on the T43. The X600 was supposed to be offered as well, but never materialized due to heat issues I believe. The T43 was noisy enough without the X600.

 

Thanks for the advice.

It looks like my father went ahead and upgraded to 1.25gb of ram (got a 1gb stick from fry's for about 40$).

Portability isn't too much of an issue. I'm a teacher, so I'm attached to my school and don't have to move around a lot. I'm actually quite surprised that I have power; my first posting in Kenya had no power, and I had to pray for rain if I wanted water. Of course, after the tribal violence precipitated by the elections in December, I was evacuated and relocated to Tanzania, where I've got a pretty swank pad, by PC standards.

I was worried about being able to play Rome, but I was able to play Civ IV on my lappy back in the day, which has similar requirements, so I'm optimistic.

 

It seems like your stretching it, but I think you could use it for another 1.5 years. Just follow the advice mentioned abovve, and make sure to maintain the system from the software side. Defrag, clean out any stuff that you don't need, and make sure to keep your computer free of spy ware because that's what kills performance.