These are probably laptops still made with the s-l-o-o-o-w 4200 RPM hard drives. Stuff all the RAM you can in one of these laptops, it'll still be slow.
I wouldn't get anything less than a 5400 RPM drive, but would try for the 7200 RPM drive. I've put 7200's in 6 year old P III laptops and effectively doubled their performance, if not more. Not rockets compared to what you can get today, but for less than $100, it's the best upgrade you can do to a laptop, bang for the buck performance-wise. > -----Original Message----- > Meaning SLOW processing whatever you are doing. Click and wait... > > I have experience this dogginess on new compacts Dell laptops (and > other > brands) running XP with 1 gb RAM. I could be wrong but RAM shouldn't > be > a factor until the point that it starts paging data / using the SWAP > file and that wasn't the case on my trials > > I just think the designers of current laptops are making processing > power trade-offs that most people just live with. I usually use > desktops and find a 6 year desktop that originally was a powerful > machine can outperform a lot of these new lower to mid range laptops. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************