which upgrades improve what tasks??

[ihateregistration]

just wondering what upgrades to go with on a dell I'm pondering (and when the hell should I buy?? they keep fing around with their "secret" coupons, I wouldnt have to nickle and dime if I just bought when they were offering 35% on 1999+ DAMMIT!)


where will I see improvements if I got with faster FSB and RAM speed?

I am always multitasking and want to avoid bottlenecks in throughput, but would I be better off dumping money into going from 1GB to 2GB, albiet at lower speed?

A 5200RPM HD sounds slow as shit, what apps will I see a difference in going to 7200RPM?

How good is ATI hypermemory? Will I EVER need more (ie Nvida 7900GS)
if I'm not a gamer?

Thanks

 

[Hose]

just wondering what upgrades to go with on a dell I'm pondering (and when the hell should I buy?? they keep fing around with their "secret" coupons, I wouldnt have to nickle and dime if I just bought when they were offering 35% on 1999+ DAMMIT!)


where will I see improvements if I got with faster FSB and RAM speed?

I am always multitasking and want to avoid bottlenecks in throughput, but would I be better off dumping money into going from 1GB to 2GB, albiet at lower speed?

A 5200RPM HD sounds slow as ****, what apps will I see a difference in going to 7200RPM?

How good is ATI hypermemory? Will I EVER need more (ie Nvida 7900GS)
if I'm not a gamer?

Thanks

#1, Dual core CPU (faster the better). Check Task Manager to see if 2GB RAM is necessary at all. Unless it's actually being *used* by apps, having extra RAM will just sit idle.

#2, 7200RPM hard drive... however, battery life reduced.

If not a gamer, any video card or even onboard will be just fine.

 

[akscottbot]

where will I see improvements if I got with faster FSB and RAM speed?

to varying degrees, everything. generally more badwidth = higher performance.

data intensive apps such as media encoding/decoding are normally bandwidth limited as they cant fit in a processors cache, though they are often limited by the bandwidth to and from the HDDs, so its a moot point. however in situations where an entire app can fit in a cpus l2 cache more bandwidth wont make a difference, but that would have to be a small program and/or a lotta cache.

more importantly within the same processor family one proc the has faster fsb's normally has a faster internal clock rate which mean better performance.

would I be better off dumping money into going from 1GB to 2GB, albiet at lower speed?

windows xp does benefit from going to 2 gigs of ram especially if you are gaming or multitasking. If you are not doing either to heavily, than the money would be better spent in faster and/or lower latency ram @ 1 gig total.

A 5200RPM HD sounds slow as ****, what apps will I see a difference in going to 7200RPM

Quite slow indeed. windows will run very slowly with that espically at startup. also if you go for less than 2 gigs of ram you will be switching apps to and from that hdd more often and thats going to be slow. however the 5200 drive will almost assuredly consume less power.

How good is ATI hypermemory? Will I EVER need more (ie Nvida 7900GS)
if I'm not a gamer?

Hyper memory is a feature that allows ATi low to mid range gpus to access main memory to supplement their onboard mem. it doesnt actually add more mem. while this adds some video performance, onboard memory is much faster, and it wont take up part of main memory. BTW a 7900gs should be substantially faster in games that a 1600, though if you are not a heavy gamer that doesnt matter