Just got my dv4000! A few questions though....

I just got my dv4000 and I love the design! I have a few questions though....

1) I got the X700 graphics card and I love it. I ran Far Cry on high settings with ease (even though when I clicked reccomended it said "low") but my question is do I need to update the driver? And if so, where do I download them?

2) I bought my own RAM separate and it works great. Is there anything I should do to like maintaince wise to sync the RAM or am I not even making sense?

3) Is it worth reformatting my harddrive? It came with a lot of pointless programs but I've deleted/removed most of them however is just formatting the drive better?

4) Any dv4000 owners reccomend anything in perticular to improve the overall speed or maintaince?

Thanks guys!

 

There is also a forum for dv4000 at www.dv4000talk.com.

 

Don't worry about the automatic detection thing in these games, they rarely work right, and usually they don't even run any proper benchmarks or tests to know the best settings for your combination of hardware (they should, but they don't). There is no way to just click a button and *pow* have it choose the *absolute best* settings based on what combination of hardware you have. Typically, guess and check is what people do. I'm sure you've probably figured this out by now.

My advise on drivers:
As always, if it ain't broke.. Don't fix it.

From my experience, newer drivers (at least by ATI) rarely change performance.

The software preinstalled on the HP laptops is not spyware/adware. So when you remove it, its completely gone..
I can't think of why you would want to reformat the drive.
Unless of course you wanted to repartition it so you could run Linux and Windows at the same time..

If there was anything that could have increased speed/performance, HP would have done it for you before sending it to you.

Maintainence wise? on the RAM? Whenever I install new RAM, I always run a program to check that I didn't damage the RAM during installation (they are static-sensitive, and I'm always careless)... http://www.memtest86.com/
Run it for about 15 minutes, if there are no errors, then its fine. Note that the test will run forever until you decide to stop it.

No, I don't own an HP laptop... At least not YET anyway

 

I run CCleaner and RegScrubXP regularly and find that makes a differnece in performance... and 3 or 4 Anti-spyware utilities of course. Man, the junk just piles up faster and faster from the 'net these days....

 

I agree with most of what Sidicas said, but...

I've seen driver updates that made a world of difference, but that won't change how games' auto-select things work. Patching the game might.... When new drivers come out, though, I always wait for a site or poster I trust to test them before I install them on my system, but if there's an ATI driver out there that is being reported as working on the x700 that's newer than the one I have, I'll get it.

Uh, no. I love my HP and they've done me right, but they're not a botique shop or your local guys who really take the time to optimize everything for you. This is a mass-produced machine, and it isn't optimized.

If you've cleaned out the bloatware that you don't want, you're good, Mav. You should defrag, of course, and the other tips in the FAQ on this site for optimizing your XP notebook are worth looking through. BootVis, for example, helps a bit with start-up. Definitely give that thread a read.

 

I've mentioned it before in the upgrade forum, but it always bears repeating - if a dv4000 or dv1000 owner decides to do a clean install, that user probably does not want to reformat the drive, just the Windows partition! If you reformat the whole, physical drive, you'll lose your QuickPlay. That is on a small partition of your drive, basically a bootable Linux-based partition that does the media functionality.

 

I did not know that.... good tip, thanks.