Re: laptop video card performance for plain windows apps

aaron.barrus@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Quaoar wrote:
You will not be able to upgrade the video "card" on the laptop, except
in a few extremely rare cases - and those depend on acquiring the
requisite parts.

You make no mention of RAM and of HD speed. Both can make a great deal
of difference owing to the way Windows uses memory and paging, depending
on the current configurations of each.

Q

Actually this laptop is upgradable. And I didn't mention the other
specs because the overall speed of the laptop is excellent. But there
are pauses when I resize windows or when selecting multiple items in a
window and it draws the transparent selection box - things like that
which are video specific (I think). And I want to know if those kinds
of things will feel snappier with more RAM on the video card. Does
windows even care how much RAM is on the card?

The video is pretty easy to upgrade. I pulled it out when I upgraded
the CPU from 1.4 to 2.0 Ghz. There are 128 meg and 256 meg "upgrades"
from ATI and Nvidia. I don't know which I should prefer - all I do is
2D stuff, and they always compare video cards for gaming.

As for the other performance specs: I hate laptops that sound like
popcorn makers - constantly chunking on the hard drive to fill every
request. I have 1GB of RAM and a 60 gig 7200 RPM hard drive. Page
file IO is rare, and when I complain about windows pausing or not being
fast enough, it's not because it's filling an IO request. The only
thing that really bugs me about the laptop is that it *feels* slow when
dragging / moving windows and all the other screen-drawing stuff.


The video cards in the I8600 were made on order specifically for Dell and designed specifically for that mainboard. There is no way that you are going to upgrade the card that is in the computer unless you get the upgraded card from Dell spare parts. I'm not going to call Dell because I know full well that they didn't order many more cards than those originally supplied with the I8600 and those they have are likely restricted for warranty replacements. You might get lucky with Dell, who knows. There definitely is no general upgrade available from ATI or Nvidia since the card was designed especially for the I8600. You might try eBay for an used card.


Q
.

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