Laptop Upgrades

Along with upgrading to Ulitmate, I also threw more hardware at my new lappie:

I upgraded the hard drive and memory (to 100MB and 2GB, respectively) and the performance specs bumped up as follows:

• Memory: 5.2
• Graphics: 3.0
• Hard disk: 5.0

The disk I installed is a 100GB/7200RPM Seagate Momentus 7200.1 ST910021AS (OEM). The RAM was 2 x 1GB Kensington KTH-ZD8000A/1G. Less than $200 from Newegg.

May seem like an excessive expense for a $500 laptop, but the perceptible improvements in performance have been worth it, IMO.

Getting started...

This post will simply stand as a reference for the hardware that I'm running.

• Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 (nForce4 for AMD, no SLI)
  
• AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ (Toledo)
• 2GB DDR-400 SDRAM
• Intel PRO/1000 PT server adapter (finally! a use for that 1x PCIe socket!)
• Plextor PX-716AL DVD+/-RW
• Plextor PX-708A
• Gigabyte GV-NX66T128D GeForce 6600GT (128MB)
• 4x 320GB Western Digital WD3200SD "RAID Edition" SATA drives in RAID1/0 (0/1?) using onboard nVidia raid.
• Dell 2407FP widescreen LCD