Rate my Laptop

littletiger

Hi all,
I have a Dell Latitude D630 with 2GB ram. How you rate this laptop. Would it be worth upgrading to 4GB and would there be any problems with doing so?

hobochris

littletiger wrote: »

Hi all,
I have a Dell Latitude D630 with 2GB ram. How you rate this laptop. Would it be worth upgrading to 4GB and would there be any problems with doing so?

I give it a 31

Alanstrainor

littletiger wrote: »

Hi all,
I have a Dell Latitude D630 with 2GB ram. How you rate this laptop. Would it be worth upgrading to 4GB and would there be any problems with doing so?

I'd give it a 3....
Your question is similar to asking "how long is a piece of string". If we dont know what you'll be doing on it, what processor it has, we wont be able to answer your question. There'd be no problems doing so, although vista/xp wont recognise the full 4Gb of RAM, presuming you're using a 32bit OS.

littletiger

Can I upgrade to a 64bit OS?

Alanstrainor

littletiger wrote: »

Can I upgrade to a 64bit OS?

If you have to ask that question i'm going to guess changing to a 64bit OS is not essential.

gamer

you can install vista 64bit,or xp 64 bit,xp can use 3gig ram,so its not worth the trouble,4 one gig ram extra , as many games,and popular programs dont run on 64bit os,and you, will have to buy a new os dvd 80euro approx.WINXP runs faster than vista on a laptop in my experience ,but i,ve never had a 3gig ram laptop.ANY dual core dell laptop is good,use msconfig, to stop unnecessary services to free up ram space for the os.PROGRAMMERS and graphics designers run 64bit os, cos they to design in 3d ,they need maximum speed ,regardess of cost.you can increase the winxp,virtual drive ,to make it run faster if there is plenty of free hardrive space.your cpu is dual core intel 2.0ghz.

testicle

Alanstrainor wrote: »

I'd give it a 3....
Your question is similar to asking "how long is a piece of string". If we dont know what you'll be doing on it, what processor it has, we wont be able to answer your question. There'd be no problems doing so, although vista/xp wont recognise the full 4Gb of RAM, presuming you're using a 32bit OS.

Vista will. XP >SP2 won't unless you add /3GB to boot.ini, depending on the processor.

Alanstrainor

testicle wrote: »

Vista will. XP >SP2 won't unless you add /3GB to boot.ini, depending on the processor.

A vista 32Bit system will only end up utilising about 3.2 - 3.5Gbs of RAM and not the full 4Gbs.

Ghost Train

Really depend on what you're using it for, should be more than enough for most tasks and fast enough if set up right. Can't see extra ram making much of a differance, unless you're doing a lot at once and noticing a slowdown

littletiger

Ghost Train wrote: »

Really depend on what you're using it for, should be more than enough for most tasks and fast enough if set up right. Can't see extra ram making much of a differance, unless you're doing a lot at once and noticing a slowdown

I am running XP, the laptop is only a few months old and it slow to open programmes and change from programme to programme and sometimes kinda has a mini crash like vista used to. I thought by adding more ram it would push through faster.

I don't run any heavy multi media programmes or anythong just the regular ones but I would be flicking around alot.

Ghost Train

Some power saving setting could slow it down

You could check in the control panel under power settings
Maybe switch the profile to desktop to see if it goes any faster as a test

Check the task manger to see how much memory programs are using and their CPU usage

Alanstrainor

littletiger wrote: »

I am running XP, the laptop is only a few months old and it slow to open programmes and change from programme to programme and sometimes kinda has a mini crash like vista used to. I thought by adding more ram it would push through faster.

I don't run any heavy multi media programmes or anythong just the regular ones but I would be flicking around alot.

2Gb of RAM should be plenty by the sounds of things. What virus software do you use? And as noted above, check your running processes.

littletiger

Alanstrainor wrote: »

2Gb of RAM should be plenty by the sounds of things. What virus software do you use? And as noted above, check your running processes.

Free AVG

Task manager
Performance
physical memory 2GB
Avaiable 1.4Gb
System Cache 821MB
CPU Usage 5 - 11% ish
PF usage 649MB

Not sure what all that means but

There seems to be 70 processes running. that seems to be alot for having nothing except Explorer open. they are nearly all exe file like csrss.exe. The only two that are changing ate the taskmgr.exe and system idle process.

Can I do anything there to speed it up?

Ghost Train

that all sounds normal enough, 70 processes is a little bit high, as long as the cpu usage is very low when doing nothing... ie no individual processes constantly above 30%

do you notice what time avg runs a scan at... if it starts scanning while you're doing other stuff it could slow things down a lot

i usually pause or cancel a scan if it starts when i'm doing other stuff


also if you've installed any toolbars or extra programs you don't really use, uninstalling them using add/remove programs might help performance a bit

Alanstrainor

Try running this http://www.ccleaner.com/

InReality

Try Defragging it as well. I hadn't done it for ages on mine , and it just zoom's along afterwards. I use one called JKDefrag , its really fast compared with XP's default one. On the ram i'd say you don't need 2 , maybe 1 if you have the cash to spare and play a lot of games.