obsidian wrote:Almost a year ago and for $300, I picked up a Compaq sr1650nx: AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB RAM, 250GB HD, then upgraded to a 6600GT for another $100. It's currently my Linux box. That was, of course, a very special one time deal that I jumped on.
I don't think anyone downgraded your RAM, the
HP website says it comes with 512MB. Depending on what kind of games you are playing, that computer is still a little dated. More RAM and (depending on what nVidia card you have in there now) a relatively cheap video card upgrade will probably be needed.
DDR2 Memory should be roughly $50 for a 1GB stick or less (ridiculously cheap these days). I picked up 2x 1GB laptop sticks for my Mac and cost me $100. Where to buy it from depends on your location, but you should perhaps try
Newegg. You certainly don't need the more expensive high latency stuff but stick with a decent brand. That Kingston 1GB for $30 looks pretty good, though read up on it just to make sure that's exactly what you need.
Thanks... I'm considering that. I see a good priced one for $40 at Staples or Best Buy. I don't feel like dealing with shipping and waiting for it to come
.
Unfortunately, my model is lacking in expansion slots. It only has one extra RAM slot and one extra PCI slot. Thankfully it doesn't have 2x256MB RAM, otherwise I'd be out of space. There's such a big price gap from the individual 1GB and 2 GB modules.
I'm thinking about upgrading my graphics processor too. It's only 64MB, contrary to what I posted first (I was mistaken. WHOOPS. Who knew they sold PC's with GPCards with < 128MB allocated memory still these days?). I've found a good 256MB one for just under $40 at geeks.com.
Microsoft's website says that they recommend half a gig of memory for Vista Basic. I don't know who did the testing for that, but they are very wrong. My games are choppier than a sufficiently talented Chinese chef. On online multiplayer games, I seem to be good at a little thing called "lag-camping." ...lol
About a year ago, I bought a PC (which is now recoverring from a near-death bout with the Vundo virus). It has everything my computer now has except two things. One: it came with 256MB of memory built-in on the video card. It also came with a monitor and windows XP. It only paid about a fifty bucks more for that one. I wonder what has happened to quality these days. For fifty less, I got 1/4 as much video card memory, a confusing OS that needs way more RAM than I have, no built-in memory card reader, and no monitor.
By the way... back to the original question. I downloaded the latest driver for my *cough*unimpressive*cough* video card. Unfortunately, Window's wonderful Vista showed me a shiny alert screen informing me that I couldn't update the driver anywhere other than their own Windows Updater (or something).