Laptop Advice

[xxrealmsxx]

I currently have a hp zv6000, athlon 64 3200+ with 512mb of ram and 128mb dedicated radeon 200m video card. I use it mainly for school/learning linux and playing some games in windows (such as dungeon seige II, Warcraft 3, Fable; no quake 4 or doom etc)

I looked into upgrading the ram hdd and cpu and it would cost me over $600 to do so (clawhammer 4000+ is $300)

Im happy with the performance except for the slow hdd and lack of ram.

I hate the size, crappy hardware support (for Ubuntu my wireless support is shoddy due to broadcom, and my video card support is also due to the ati 200m chip), pointless 64 bit processor I never use and the battery life

Is it worth upgrading my laptop to a 7200 rpm drive, 2 gigs of ram for $300 or so, and possibly a 4000+ processor for another $300 and just waiting for better hardware support?

Or should I save and get a new dell with a core duo and a 12'' screen?

I am a college student so either would be a big purchase, currently im leaning towards just upgrading the laptops ram and harddrive but would like a 2nd opinion.

Lastly how do the core duo's stand up against the athlon 64's? I can't find any benchmarks comparing the laptop offerings in either.

Thanks In advance.

[rai4shu2]

You never use 64-bit Linux? It seems to me that would be a huge speed-up for your system.

[hizaguchi]

More RAM is never a bad thing, but unless you do alot of stuff that reads the HD I don't think I'd worry too much about that. It's not like you'd be swapping much with 2 gigs of ram.

I can't say much about the processors up in that range though. I have a 1.7GHz P4 in my laptop with only 128 MB ram, while my desktop has a 733MHz P3 and 512 MB ram. The desktop is very noticably faster for anything except compiling, and then the laptop is only faster if I do it outside of X (so I'm not using up my memory). So I don't imagine going from one very nice processor to another, even nicer, processor is going to make nearly as much difference as memory will. But then again, I can't imagine what I would do with 1 gig, much less 2 gigs, of ram either.

[xxrealmsxx]

You never use 64-bit Linux? It seems to me that would be a huge speed-up for your system.

Well there is the matter of CRAP hardware support, thats why I have not used 64 bit linux or windows. Even 64 bit vista does not have a sound driver for my card.


More RAM is never a bad thing, but unless you do alot of stuff that reads the HD I don't think I'd worry too much about that. It's not like you'd be swapping much with 2 gigs of ram.

I can't say much about the processors up in that range though. I have a 1.7GHz P4 in my laptop with only 128 MB ram, while my desktop has a 733MHz P3 and 512 MB ram. The desktop is very noticably faster for anything except compiling, and then the laptop is only faster if I do it outside of X (so I'm not using up my memory). So I don't imagine going from one very nice processor to another, even nicer, processor is going to make nearly as much difference as memory will. But then again, I can't imagine what I would do with 1 gig, much less 2 gigs, of ram either.


Yeah, well I use a lot of filesharing applications, watch movies that sort of thing. Im pretty sure i'm going to go for all 2 gigs.

I looked into the pricing, its cheaper to just keep my existing laptop.

Does your desktop run ubuntu? I can't get my 600mhz desktop to run the live cd :(.

[hizaguchi]

Yeah, it was running Ubuntu up until I decided I wanted to give Suse a try and needed somewhere to install it. :) I never tried the live CD though. I've just been upgrading since Warty. You can use the "alternative" install disc to do the old style, ncurses, installation though and avoid that half hour live CD booting process.

[xxrealmsxx]

Yeah, it was running Ubuntu up until I decided I wanted to give Suse a try and needed somewhere to install it. :) I never tried the live CD though. It takes forever to boot. I just use the "alternative" installer. Faster and, I think, easier than the new installer. I had Dapper on it about a month ago though, so unless it just became a whole lot more demanding there shouldn't be a problem.

Whats the alternative install?

I'm trying to put ubuntu on my little sisters computer (11 yrs old) to see if I can get her into computers a bit more than just playing flash games and quake II 24/7 and to sort of test this whole "nix is as easy as windows to use" theory.

[hizaguchi]

It's under the list of downloads for Dapper. The labeling is a little misleading. It says something like "for OEM or special installs" I think. But it is the old style installer that uses ncurses instead of trying to boot into a full desktop just to do an installation.

[hizaguchi]

On the download page, it is listed under:

Alternate install CD

The alternate install CD allows you to perform certain specialist installations of Ubuntu. It provides for the following situations:

* creating pre-configured OEM systems;
* setting up automated deployments;
* upgrading from older installations without network access;
* LVM and/or RAID partitioning;
* installing GRUB to a location other than the Master Boot Record;
* installs on systems with less than about 192MB of RAM.

There are three images available, each for a different type of computer:

[Ubunted]

ATi drivers are a breeze with this guide (http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Dapper_Installation_Guide).

[xxrealmsxx]

ATi drivers are a breeze with this guide (http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Dapper_Installation_Guide).


I have 512mb of ram to get it to work i have to share some with the video card which has 128mb dedicated to it, from my readings even that doesnt work sometimes.

Lets just say ati drivers on the zv6000 are just as much a "Breeze" to get working as ndiswrapper and/or broadcom native support.