Hard Drive And RAM Questions

Keith W

Keith W

Messages
7,408
Edit My Images
Yes
My wife had an old laptop kicking about which she said I could have if I wanted.

I think this thing came out of the ark

It is a very old Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro, with a 40GB hard drive, 512MB RAM and running XP

I have now kicked XP into touch and installed Ubuntu on it so it runs a bit faster but to be honest it still struggles a bit.

So what I am looking for is the best place to source a new hard drive and RAM.

I need a 2.5" SATA hard drive and 2 x 1GB sticks of DDR2 PC2-533 200pin SODIM

Anybody got any suggestions for the best place to go to source the above for a reasonable price?
 
Last edited:
An old Amilo will still be slow even if you install go faster stripes.... You sure the money you spend on memory/disk wouldn't be better spent on a new machine?

I have to say my view on laptops is that unless you buy the fastest available at the time, you need to be thinking of upgrading every 2 years. At least that's how it's always worked here :)
 
My wife would love that, she would claim the new laptop as hers within seconds LOL

This is just a small project of mine, something to mess around with Linux on
 
In which case, ebuyer. I've spent thousands with them over the years and only occasionally are they not the best price.
 
arad85 said:
In which case, ebuyer. I've spent thousands with them over the years and only occasionally are they not the best price.
Click to expand...

Ebuyer... Been using them for years. Great company! And I've always used their free delivery service and NEVER waited longer than three days
 
Which Amilo is it? There may be BIOS limits to HDD size depending on how old it is....
 
Should be OK then - the chipset supports 48-bit LBA (if you don't have this you limit the disk size to 137Gbytes). Always assuming the BIOS has support!

Chipset looks to be SATA as opposed to SATA II, might be worth checking drive compatibility before you splash the cash.
 
Hi Andy,

What is the correct RAM I would be looking for?

I am getting slightly confused by all the numbers etc.
 
hi I got a couple of 512mb ddr2 sticks, and a 8gb sata disk, to be honest for just mucking about, then you'll find 1GB be enough..

if you want 2gb...pop on to the crucial web site and you can search for ram by machine, that give you the part number that you can buy elsewhere...also worth checking Dabs, Scan or Ebuyer....

GJUK
 
Keith W said:
Hi Andy,

What is the correct RAM I would be looking for?

I am getting slightly confused by all the numbers etc.
Click to expand...
2 x 1Gb DDR2-533MHz 200pin SODIMM m odules, like those here:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/98696

or here:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/118515

If you look at the Crucial site, you get to: http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/listparts.aspx?model=Amilo Pro V8010&Cat=RAM

which is faster memory. It appears 533MHz is so old now Crucial don't stock it!!

If you're running Linux on a sloooww PC, do you need more than a 40G HDD?
 
Hi Andy,

Thanks for that

The HD is something I may look at upgrading latter on I think, for now I am going to upgrade the RAM and see what sort of performance increase I get.
 
Keith W said:
Hi Andy,

Thanks for that

The HD is something I may look at upgrading latter on I think, for now I am going to upgrade the RAM and see what sort of performance increase I get.
Click to expand...
Probably very little TBH. Linux is quite memory efficient. Have a look: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-check-memory-usage/ to see some tools for measuring memory. Linux does use any spare memory as a filesystem cache, so you will probably gain if you're reading/writing a lot of stuff...
 
75% of RAM is being utilised at idle so if ask it to actually do something it struggles
 
Fair enough.... Probably using 128Mbytes just for graphics memory, so that's 25% gone immediately.
 
Slight change of plan

The Amilo is just for messing around on so I have decided to up the RAM on the wife's old Presario that she uses just for word processing and then take the RAM from that and stick it in Amilo
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top