Computer Questions - One and All!

tell me your target price/budget

Solid State Drive, Its essentially a big flashdrive. Instead of a disc, the inside of Solid State Drive are flash memory, kinda like your ram or flashdrive, which stores your file. The main advantage is that since there is no disc to spin, the data is quickly stored and read. Plus there's no read/writing noise which makes your laptop quiet.

whahha I also misunderstand your question!! :sic::cebollita06:
yea upgrading your ram is a good idea. In addition, buying a SSD (solid state drive) will improve your laptop's performance. :bingo:

As for graphics, its....really really really hard to upgrade even maybe impossible with your laptop model. You have to disassemble your laptop find the graphics card and unsolder it then solder the new one. Its really hard and dangerous if your not careful. Even I wouldn't do that, I'll just buy a laptop with graphics I wanted. :22:

Like the chinese proverb Lao Tzu said "Give a Man a Fish, Feed Him For a Day. Teach a Man to Fish, Feed Him For a Lifetime"

What good if I know this stuff and dont share it?? o.O

ok here's the general rule of applying thermal compound. You have to apply a tiny/small amount of compound. You don't want to apply more than it needs to, in fact less compound is better.

Here's why. Thermal Compound/paste/grease is kinda like the bridge to your cpu and heatsink of your cooling (fan or liquid).

This is good example to small/tiny thermal compound ( yes I made a quick picture !! )

Notice that the heat generated by the CPU goes to the heatsink

This is example of wrong application of the compound.

Notice how the heat goes to heatsink AND then the heatsink give the heat to the cpu.

The role of thermal compound is to distribute the heat to the heatsink

hahha yeah :) and giving knowledge feels good too :cebollita19:

I find it easier to explain things with pictures and diagrams. Just like my math professor told me..."every person remembers patterns and images".

200$ :o
hmmm with that price its really very hard to get a decent gaming laptop with that :onion18:

maybe used one or netbook prolly.

For a decent laptop, you should get at lease dualcore processor. As for graphics and memory, 2 gb should be enough ram and for graphics, Nvidia GT 350m or AMD Radeon (former ATI) 4830+/5730+ should give a fairly stable and decent framerates.

tell me about it, many of their employee doesn't seem to know much about computers parts. About a month ago, I went to best-buy to buy a video card for my friend. I asked one of the employee in computer section where I could find a particular card, Nvidia 240 or ATi 5750, that in mind. He said they don't have it. But I went and see the video card section and found the card that I was looking for. :damn:

I think your reading about dual channel memory. Dual-channel is much cheaper, but I don't know if your laptop supports it.

DDR2 and DDR3 is not the same it, depends on what CPU/motherboard your using. DDR2 and DDR3 is not compatible with each other, meaning you cant use DDR3 ram on your laptop.

having a good gfx card improves your frame rate as well as other enchantments such as physics and lighting

having more ram improves your frame rate a little bit, but the main advantage having more memory is the load times( with good cpu too). Cause your computer can cache more data on your ram. This typically noticeable on games that load alot of data such MMO games and Sandbox games.

But if you wanna play, let say Call of Duty 4, having 1 to 2gb of Ram is enough (providing you have a decent gpu)

I usually first buy the case,PSU, motherboard, and Cpu :P then after Ram, GPU, and Harddisk

whats ur current gpu tom?

@wolfenspiel

If your looking for pc parts I usually star here pricewatch.com then logicbuy.com then newegg.com. After those its amazon and tigerdirect. And IF I want my parts now....I usually go buy them on frys electronics :P (bestbuy suck )

@tomdawes

wow that card is old! :sorry: still AGP

@[deleted]

wolfenspiel pretty much sums its up, especially if something is broken, you usually have to pay 70-90% of the price of your laptop.

btw I like to add the "things that go wrong first" is the graphics. And also.....the dead pixels which I hate so much -_- .

@[deleted]

I agree... I can't do my stuff on a netbook other than use the word processor, which still suck cause you cannot see 3/4 of the page without zooming it out -_- . Still, iPad sucks moar! haahh that pricey little, big, iTouch :cebollita19:

about your monitor. if your monitor automatically detects DVI/VGA interface then you should be ok. If not..then you might wanna use a splitter :)

tomdawes;197065 wrote

kingston or crucial - but maybe kamikazee has other memory companies he likes better ...

Yea Kingston is good as well as Pny,OCZ, G.Skill, Crucial, Corsair. DONT get generic ones cause they will die in couple of days/weeks

VLC is using its own(internal) codecs to play the videos and musics from your computer.

The problem on your computer when playing videos ( if your not using VLC :) ) is that the codecs might be running all at once i.e. all video codecs wants to play that video. There should be a control options if you installed K-lite or CCCP on your computer to configure whose codec will be used.

Lol, sorry WP but I could not bring myself to read all of that. Im just gonna say go with what he said...im sure the advice is solid. Cheers.

Quirk;197644 wrote

Well that settles it.
At the mo I have a slim screen of a size
wireless mouse and keyboard
and a 2003 Win XP
Now I am going to just buy a new tower and an external hard drive.

Thanks for the info, I have never heard half the crap about laptops and now am going to steer clear from them, the devils sandwhich.

Any suggestions for which kinda tower i should get? Only for playing music/movies, writing and lots of speed so no lagging. I may play games but most likely not. So what brand or type should i get?

I hate to say it but for what you are looking for I think a Mac is the best option, lol. I personally dislike Mac's as they never have what I want, but for movies/music, video editing, graphic design (certainly not graphical power for one) and stuff like that, a Mac is the best option, but they are expensive. If you are not gonna game than a base line PC that has decent parts but nothing too fancy should do you fine. There are disc drives and hard drives that write at different speeds, and their costs will reflect that. You can get fast cd drives in the $30-$50 range while getting a fast HD might set you back a bit more. If you really need speed on the HD, a 10,000 RPM one is what you may be looking for but its more prone to failures as it is faster and has more moving parts, therefore it can break down fast as well. Its up to you really. I built my own computer from scratch and it worked out well.