Purchasing RAM for ZV6005us

I recently picked up the ZV6005us; 3200+ AMD 64, 512Meg Ram, 128 dedicated video, 80gig hard drive. I was wondering if removing one 256Meg stick and replacing it with a 512 meg stick would make enough of a differance? I'm really not interested in shelling out the money for 1gig. Please give me your opinions on this.

Cope

 

Hi Cope,

It all depends on what you're doing with the machine. How is it performing now? Before you get more RAM, you should:

a. consider doing a clean installation of your Windows XP and your application programs. HP will load onto your computer a lot of run-time programs (running in the background) that will slog things down (to see what is running, do a ctrl-alt-del and look at the applications running).
b. always be sure your disk is de-fragged. That speeds things up.

If things are still slow, then consider:

1. If you are playing games, consider upgrading the ati integrated video to an Express 54-based card when they become available. As you know, the intalled ati xpress 200m is integrated video (inadequate for games and 3D graphics). However, we have PCI-Express technology, so that a faster, PCI-Express add in card can be plugged in (when available).

2. If you are just doing basic MS Office stuff, what you have should be fine, with some system tweaks.

3. If you are doing video-editing stuff, you would benefit from added RAM.

4. Also, in about a year (who knows?), MS XP 62-bit will have drivers for most popular hardware & software. That should speed things up considerably!

- If you do decide to get more RAM, someone posted that Fry's Electronics has a good deal on Kensington RAM. If you're going to spend the bucks, why not go with a gig for around $130? It used to be that the difference between RAM increments would mean many hundreds of dollars!

 

I think you mean Kingston RAM, here:
http://shop4.outpost.com/product/4389075

 

yeah, Kingston.... that's what I meant!

 

My zv6005us has the dedicated 128megs and it plays empire earth 2 great. I followed the notebook optimizer from the hardware section and it worked great. I would sure like to know more about the Express 54-based card for video? How will they work?

 

What type of cards will be avilable for the 54 slot? Other than your basic fire wire, usb, and lan add ons.

 

They won't. Express 54 is an update of the old PCMCIA/PCCard card slot. There is a mini PCIe internal slot standard (nVidia's MXM, ATI probably has one too) for video cards but the zv6000 doesn't have one.

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by robcope