Is it worth it??

[torombolo]

I might be coming up with a Compaq Armada M700 for free, this was used for some out of the office work. This computer has a Pentium III, 1000MHz, 384 MB. At the moment it has no operating system I don't know why. Would it be worth the trouble and money to take this thing and geting a nice video card, plenty of memory, and XP???
As you can already tell I'm not that knowlegable of computers, I only use it at work.

Thanks in advance for the advice.

Sorry, I was just playing with it and it has Windows 2000 PRO

 

[Lexluethar]

No. Even Xp will be relatively slow on that thing. It will also only have AGP video slots which are becoming obsolete.

 

[torombolo]

Thanks Lex

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

What are you talking about? You can't upgrade a video card in a laptop! No, it won't have AGP slots, it won't have PCI slots, and it most certainly won't have PCI-e slots. It is a LAPTOP! Laptops have integrated graphics that cannot be upgraded (without replacing the whole motherboard). On the other hand, you can upgrade the RAM. Going to 512MB would be a good idea. XP will be fine on it. 1000MHz is plenty for XP, I have it running pretty well on my 850MHz P3 laptop, so a 1GHz laptop will easily run XP. I have 512MB RAM on mine though. As for an OS, if you don't want to spend any money and don't want to use "alternative methods" of obtaining XP, Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 in particular) would run very well on that PC and is free. If all you want to use it for is Web browsing, e-mail, chat, photos, music, video, etc (basically no games), it will easily do all of those tasks in Linux.

 

[KSoD]

Calc some laptops can upgrade video cards. Just not all. It is a very select group that can upgrade video.

 

[KurrentEweser]

And most laptops have a mini PCI slot which are most likely filled with a wireless adapter or a modem.

I have an old Toshiba P3-650 with only 192mb of ram. It's slow as to be expected. But it makes a good laptop for general browsing while using a PCMCIA wireless adapter. It runs better in XP than it did Win98 SE. XP had all the drivers built in.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

Calc some laptops can upgrade video cards. Just not all. It is a very select group that can upgrade video.

Those would be high end gaming laptops, replaceable video card technology in laptops is pretty new (and still sadly not standardized). I highly doubt a 5+ year old Pentium 3 laptop would have a replaceable card. Maybe a new Dell XPS or something, but not an old Pentium 3.

As for the mini-PCI, yeah, they do have those. I think my old laptop has one with a modem in it, while my new laptop might use mini-PCI for its wireless card. Again, mini-PCI doesn't have video cards for it, so that's not a way to upgrade video.

I wish they'd come up with some sort of STANDARDIZED mini-PCIe for video, where you could upgrade any laptop's GPU.

 

[Lexluethar]

Regardless, i didn't realize it was a laptop.

I personally still do not feel it would be worth the trouble or money.

 

[torombolo]

Thanks for the help. Yes I want it for web borwsing, email, pics, vds ec. But I'm also going to install some sims like FS9, Real flight 3.5 and sony vista for video editing. I know this lap top wont work with all of this.
I'm seriouslly considering the DELL XPS M1530 for this. It has Intel core duo. 3 GB. Any good??

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

XPS seem pretty good. You'll want a faster Core 2 Duo (I have the T9300 2.5GHz and it is FAST) and a good graphics chip. 3GB RAM is plenty.