PCTech Forums

Posted: **Mon Mar 15, 2004 11:12 pm**

I want to increase the speed of a laptop. I recently bought a firewire pcmcia card for a friend. My friend is using the firewall to watch his golf swing in slowmotion recorded from a digital camera. He told me that he looses memory after about 10 minutes of it. So, i want to know if a video card would be more appropriate of an upgrade on this circumstance or would i just want to increase the memory. I am not that familiar with the inside of notebooks and am not sure if the vid card is soldered onto the board. It's a compaq. Any opinions would be appreciated

John

Posted: **Mon Mar 15, 2004 11:41 pm**

Can you give us the Specs. of this Computer?
brad

Posted: **Tue Mar 16, 2004 2:04 am**

>>vid card is soldered onto the board.<<

As far as I know, always. Aside from system RAM and sometimes the hard drive, laptop's innards are very hard to upgrade without swapping out the entire system board -- and that is no picnic since every laptop uses a proprietary motherboard and whichever one you want to swap into the machine has to fit in among a million other components squeezed in cheek by jowl.

Yes give us the specs and the OS. More RAM, if possible given the limits of the motherboard and OS, never hurts.

alan

Posted: **Tue Mar 16, 2004 2:17 am**

Exactly as alan stated. Need the Machine's specs. You can get external hardware as you stated. Internally you can add HD and Memory but PCMCIA cards are virtually limitless and that's not counting USB and Firewire.
brad

Posted: **Wed Mar 17, 2004 10:01 pm**

I finally got the make and model for the notebook men. It's a
1800 T Compaq Presario
pentium III
448 MHz
64 MB of Ram
DVD player...NO BURNER
WINDOWs XP

Posted: **Thu Mar 18, 2004 10:24 am**

If you've only got 64mb Ram I'll bet WinXP isn't running very well at all.
Your Compaq Presario 1800T will support 320mb Ram. You have 64mb that are permanently installed therefore you can add 256mb.
Check Crucial for your Ram: .
The $109 would be well spent towards speeding up your computer.
I'd also check to see what's being launched at startup, you can probably speed things up here, too. Start / Run / Type MSCONFIG Click "Ok" / Startup Tab. Check to see what you can eliminate.
brad

Posted: **Sat Mar 20, 2004 3:15 am**

Thank you fellows. I've decided to recommend the 256MB RAM upgrade. I'll let ya all know the increase in performance if my friend decides to go with my recommendations.