RAM upgrade vs new laptop

Craigus17

I bought my laptop about 3 maybe 4 years ago and its starting to get a bit aged and I've noticed a huge decline in its performance.

When I bought it it was just under £1000 (about $750 in US money)

Its an HP Pavillion ZD803EA and I don't know the specs off the top of my head but it has a 2.8ghz pentium 4 processor, and I *think* 1MB RAM

I dont play PC games very often (I normally play on my Wii and my 360), but I will probably be renewing my WoW membership soon to keep my busy through the summer.

If I'm going to get back into PC gaming I need to do something about my laptop's performance. Basically what I want to know is should I go for a RAM upgrade on my laptop, or should I just buy a new one???

Craigus17

Have reposted thread at Moe's, sorry

Photon

I googled but i cant find an hp laptop with a model number anything like that. I think you meant 1GB of ram, but you can check this by right clicking on my computer and clicking properties (in XP at least) .. it will state your amount of ram down the bottom.

If you dont like its performance then some extra ram may help, however if you were happy with performance before it went downhill, it may be that simply a format/reinstall of your OS would do the trick.

Also .. £1000 is nearly $2000

Edit: me too, reposted reply in the other thread

Dixon

Most likely 1gb of memory, and most likely it's going to be DDR 1 probablly 400mhz (most likely case). Now older memory is more expensive and what most manufactures like to do is have two slots in there and they usaully fill them both with 512mb pieces. So to get any reasonable gain you'd have to take out 512mb then stick in a 1gb stick. The stick would cost around 70-80 bucks I think. Now your most likely running XP, take note that any new laptop will be vista, you could install an XP OS but not the one from your old laptop as thats prob a manufacturer copy and it will detect that you have different hardware (most of the time) and won't install, you would have to buy an OEM version. Thats if you really care about what OS your using. Also It might not be just your memory thats causing the slow down, you said you noticed a large drop in performance, have you installed anything new lately? such as anti-virus or you may have some sort of onfection on the machine causeing the slow down. Also you can check how much memory you have by going to Control Panel > System then if the first window it will tell you how much memory you have, if you can't find the System icon click on "switch to classiv view" on the left side of the control panel window. If you want to get back into gaming and you use a laptop your going to have to get something which a better proccessor and video, I haven't check the video on your current laptop, but most likely it's on board and that won't do.

EDIT: I see move on me while I type