m1530 upgrades

hi im looking for some helpfull advice,
i bought a dell xps m1530 with the specs as follows

vista home premium 32bit
intel core duo T7250 2ghz, 2mb l2, 800mhz
2gb ram
8600m GT
160gb 5400RPM 8MB

i bought this a few months ago and now have some extra money was wondering what would be the best part(s) to upgrade to gain perfomance.

i use my laptop mostly for games and web browsing

thanks in advance

 

Perhaps a upgrade to a 7200RPM HD? Processor upgrades aren't worth it, you might want to look at adding another GB of RAM and the graphics card isn't upgradeable.

 

thanks for the quick reply, if i was going to upgrade my ram would it be better to get two 2gig sticks rather than just one?

also with the hard drive would i need to buy a retail version of vista seeing my laptop only came with a windows restore disk not the actual windows, and is there a way of copying over the data from my current to a new HD

any help would be great

 

The RAM is the cheapest and easiest upgrade then the HDD. You could upgrade the CPU but that gets expensive and warranty issues so I would not encourage that at least at this point and for most users never.

I would recommend you buy 1X2GB stick about $40. Windows 32bit will only see about 3GB up to maybe 3.5GB tops. People may say buy 4GB because of Dual channel. 3GB will run in Dual Channel and the bandwidth performance hit will only be 3% and it will save you $40. The HDD will help but on like the RAM which should overall make system seem faster the HDD will only show in certain situations, startup should be a little faster, the first time you open an application that must load into memory should be faster but that is about it other than if you transfer lots of files and then yes that also. Remember very large 5400 (320GB) have almost the same transfers as the fastest 7200 a little slower random access but not buy much. The HDD can be improved but I doubt your 160GB 5400 is a dog so nothing drastic. Also have you removed bloatware? Have you checked out the Vista tweaking guide on this site? Do you defrag? Those can have a very large impact on performance sometimes even greater than hardware. Good luck. And finally even though technically it has no effect on performance I believe adding nice stickers does not hurt performance.

 

hey thanks for the info powerpack, i think i will invest in some more ram

about the HD if i got a new one would i need to buy vista seeing dell only sent me a vista restore cd not an actual copy of vista? if so it might be better to get vista 64 and get two 2gig sticks?

also is there a way to copy my data from one HD to another dont no if u can have a master and slave drives with laptops

and as for stickers i got some from my razer mouse tht i have put on

sorry about all the questions help would be awesome

 

Your Vista CD IS Vista. Check out the reformat your Dell guide, link below.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=157838

 

ahh ok i just remeber changeing my HD in my old fujitsu desktop pc and it wouldnt let me install the os on a new hard drive but i guess this isnt the case with dell from what you are saying

 

My disc says:

Operating System Already Installed On Your System
Re installation DVD
Windows Vista Ultimate 32Bit

With an OEM version of Windows you will likely have to call MS to authenticate the install after changing a major piece of hardware like a hard drive. I just tell them the other one died and I had to get a new one. No biggie. The install process will give you the number to call.