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How to identify the component slowing me down?

S

seismik

Senior member
I've got a pair of NEC Versa LXi laptops that were once decent computers. They're both P3-450MHz Intel CPUs, with 256MB RAM, 8MB integrated video systems and 17GB harddrives. They run 2000/XP very slowly, and I'd like to upgrade them a little (if it's worth it) to speed them up -- problem is I have no idea what to upgrade. They seem to be thrashing around on the harddrives a lot... so my initial thought is new harddrives for them. Are them some benchmarks I can run to determine what is the slowest link on them now? If so, what should I run? Thanks...
 
Definatley Ram. Thats always made the biggest improvements in my laptops. Have you defragged and also cleared out unneccassary programs. Earlier this year I used the reconfiguration disk that came with my Toshiba, man what a difference. I had two years of crap that got cleaned out and that puppy perked right up. Don't know if NEC's come with a reconfig disk, but if so that may help too.
 
I'm well beyond clearing out unused programs and defrags -- I've wiped out the entire partitions and reformatted the drive when I put XP on. They've got those new Hitachi 7200RPM laptop harddrives out which look like they'd made a big difference, I think they've got 5400 or maybe even 4200 RPM drives in there now. I'll try the RAM thing first though, see if I can notice any improvement. It would be cool to see a program out there that literally tells you the biggest bottleneck on this system is <fill in the blank>.
 
I can see a much higher speed HD could be helpful. But given you've got only 256 ram, I should think increasing that first off to 512 or so would be the best bet. After that, I'd be lookin to upgrade the HD. Good Luck with it.
 
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