Curious about possibly upgrading my Laptop?

[FlyingStone]

I have heard time and time again it is not worth it, and for the most part i agreed. But now my memory is getting chewed up worse than bubble gum. At the time this laptop was going to serve as a family computer, mainly because it was 1,400 and at the time i did not have the money to even help buy it so we agreed to share it. But now i am the only one using it. When me and father went to Compusa we asked around started looking on our own comparing this between that and we where up in the 2000$ range. Thank God a tech help us out and convinced us on a HP Pavilion dv5000. Its been about a year and its doing great but my father is becoming so obsessed with backing up this computer. I keep telling him that there is nothing on here so critical important that we should worry, yet he en sits. I un-installed all of my games, painting program and animation things, and all of my music. It made a huge difference, things started going a tad faster and smoother then when i had all my stuff on here.
Anyways here is my questions. Would it be better to buy a upgraded memory for this laptop and install it in the motherboard, or how ever you would go about doing that? Or, would it be better just to buy a external memory storage and just use that and keep the stock memory on this?
Or am i going about this all wrong? Maybe start looking into a Desktop instead? I am on very unstable ground with this and i really don't want to do something that doesn't make sense to do with a laptop.
Any advice, directions?
Thank you all very much :)
-F.S

[InnerGoat]

Buying more memory for the laptop will be fine as memory is cheap, but you'd enjoy your own desktop pc more, imo.

[FlyingStone]

Yeah i know i would. At the time when we bought this we weren't exactly thinking to far ahead and this laptop that i am on was suppose to be for family use and i would get my own desktop.
That fell threw. Would it matter if i got a external memory instead of internal or would that just be a no-no?
Thanks,
-F.S

[legionaire45]

By "memory" do you mean hard drive space (ex. You are running out of room and can't install a new piece of software) or RAM (Your computer is becoming really really slow)?

If it's the former, it's easy enough to just buy yourself a USB/Firewire/whatev external Hard drive and plug it in. You'll have to lug it around with you if you want to take the data with you, but it's probably easier then ripping into a laptop that may not have easy access to the hard drive.

If you mean RAM, that might be a little bit more complicated, but it isn't rocket science. Just google around for some installation guides, it shouldn't be too hard. It looks like your laptop uses DDR1, so just look around on sites like newegg or tigerdirect for something that fits your budget. Remember though that you're looking for notebook memory, not desktop memory.

[FlyingStone]

Yes its space, i removed all my games and what not and got it down to 20 GB of stuff. But the thing is that i removed everything that i would like to have/had. I don't mind taking the time to re-install everything but if i went to go get a external hard drive would it be like bang all my stuff is right there? Or is like i have load it off that hard drive and onto this one?
I'll look into it myself too, feel like a idiot asking these simple questions.
RAM will increase speed and Memory allows me to store more stuff.
Never did fully understand what RAM was, bad i know...
Thanks Legionaire, Goat.
-F.S

[legionaire45]

Yes its space, i removed all my games and what not and got it down to 20 GB of stuff. But the thing is that i removed everything that i would like to have/had. I don't mind taking the time to re-install everything but if i went to go get a external hard drive would it be like bang all my stuff is right there? Or is like i have load it off that hard drive and onto this one?
With an external drive you won't have to move or reinstall any of your apps or anything. What I would recommend is that you only keep applications on your laptop and then put all your docs/whatev on your external. Thats what my mom does with her lappy and it works well enough considering she has the entire set of apps of CS2 and a bunch of other pieces of software.
I'll look into it myself too, feel like a idiot asking these simple questions.
RAM will increase speed and Memory allows me to store more stuff.
More or less.
Never did fully understand what RAM was, bad i know...
Ram is basically the piece(s) of hardware in your comp that store(s) data (usually pulled from the hard drive) to be processed by the CPU or sent off wherever it needs to go. Basically the more you have the more apps you can concurrently run or the more files you can have open. If you start to run out of physical ram, then your computer will start to use virtual memory, which is painfully slow. Thats my simplified explanation anyway, I'm sure someone else would be able to explain it better (*cough*, Goat or Atty, *cough*).
Thanks Legionaire, Goat.
Your welcome <3.
-F.S
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