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What computer upgrades should i get for my hp pavilion a620n desktop?

I have a hp pavilion a620n desktop. It has windows xp home and runs amd athlon. It has 160 hard drive and 512 ddr and can run a max of 1gb of ddr in a combined of two slots. It has no graphic card. Can you help me and give good but cheap ideas to upgrade my computer so it isn't so crappy.

Public Comments

1. Upgrading to 1GB of RAM would be my first move. RAM is really cheap now. The type of RAM you will need is " 184 pin, DDR1-333 SDRAM " - Also mix matching RAM can cause a problem. Sometimes it's easier to buy 2 new sticks of the same type. Look on E-Bay or goto a computer repair shop! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You can upgrade your video at a very low cost. You could get a 128MB - 256MB AGP Video card for under $100 http://cgi.ebay.ca/ATI-Radeon-9200-256-MB-AGP-3D-Video-Card-TV-Out-VGA-DVI_W0QQitemZ120537700178QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_Components?hash=item1c109b5752 This will speed up your screen display and free up your RAM --------------------------- Best bet is to goto a computer repair shop - they always have older items for sale at a cheap price.
2. The other guys recommendations are good, but his prices are off. If you go to a website like www.newegg.com, you should be able to upgrade your ram for around $30 and your graphics card could cost as low as $30 if you find the right combination of mail in rebates or sales. You would need to install the items yourself, but they really are just plug and play. I haven't looked up your computer, so I can't tell you the specs of what you will need,but graphically, you would either need AGP, PCI, or PCI Express. It may limit you, but you are almost 100% certain to have a PCI slot, so if you don't know and don't want to risk it, you can always just go PCI (PCI tend to not be as good as the other two options). Same with ram, just make sure that the speeds match. It is not simply important that you have the right size and ram type, but you also need the right speed that your motherboard can support. It is possible you can go up to 2 gb of ram despite what the specs say, but it is at your own risk. The third thing you could do it upgrade the hard drive. This can be done in two ways, speed and size. You can increase the size and have more space. But the other thing you can do is increase speed. There are two "faster" hard drives. The first is known as the raptor hard drive, which runs at 10,000 rpm versus the standard 7200 or the slower 5400, this means things from this hard drive load faster. You could keep your current drive, and install a second hard drive. Install windows and all of your programs on the faster hard drive, and then all the data and less important things on the slower one. This would increase the speed you run programs and start up the computer. The second "faster" hard drives are a newer technology, solid state drives, which are basically flash drives, but big and hard drive shaped. You have two options, the one stated above, which means you could probably survive with a 60 gb hard drive, and then keep all the data on your bigger one, or you can just replace the one you have with a bigger faster one, although that will cost money. The smaller sizes cost around $70, the bigger ones would cost around $150 and up. Other upgrades you could make, if you were looking to get more out of your computer, would be a sound card (for $30 sound card and $50 speakers, you could turn the sound on your computer into something awesome), a TV tuner (for about $50 you can turn your computer into a DVR to record and watch television). If you were looking to do something fun with your computer, with a decent graphics card, you can actually plug the computer into a television, and then you can use it as a media center PC, playing movies from it, strait from the hard drive if you'd like. Hope that helps.