How long will my A31 1.8Ghz be good for my main computer?

[tbessie]

I have my A31 1.8Ghz, and now an X40 for portability, but I like having my A31 as my main machine. I can do development on it, do most things, the only thing it's not GREAT at is lots of multimedia processing (and it's not terrible at that, either).

I am thinking of maxing out the memory in it (now 512MB, can go up to 1GB), for around $230 from Crucial, but wonder if that's really worth it to me, since I rarely get around to using all the memory (only happens when doing said large multimedia operations and some Java development work).

Just wondering if I should get something like a top-of-the-line R series or perhaps T series (although I don't need the light weight of the T, so the R might be fine) to place the A31... but the A31 is built so well, I'm worried the R series machine won't be as good.

Any ideas? Would you get the memory, or, in a year or so, a new desktop-replacement Thinkpad?

- Tim

[wredgum]

Actually with the newer bios's you can go to 2Gb. I also was looking for a new machine (partly weight, partly speed) and my central I/T guy suggested trying the memory upgrade.

I do run things that consume over 1Gb and the difference is amazing. Looking at things I have a 1.8GHz CPU, a media chip that approximates the latest Fire T2 (???), ability to have 3 HDD online, s-video in/out, and a great screen. Albeit in a heavy package but it hasn't lengthened my arm yet!

Give the memory upgrade a try, and turn on all the caching options in Windows. Keeping everything you need in memory really does speed a lot of things up. Perhaps look at the 60Gb faster HDD as well, I don't bother as I am running a 80Gb instead. But basically the delta features to the T42p didn't make it as compelling an upgrade as yet, that I had to make the change.

[wolfman]

I can second this recommendation from my personal experience.

I upgraded my R40 to 1 gig of ram which worked nicely, but hard drive was the bottleneck still. So I added in a 7200 rpm drive with 8 meg of cache and it cut initial load times for one of my software applications from 60-70 seconds to 20-25 seconds (WebSphere Studio Application Developer 5.1.2 with smallish workspace). In tasks for application development this Pentium 4-M 2.0 gigahertz works perfectly fine. Much more important than CPU, in my opinion, to the speed 'feel' of the machine was the 1 gig of ram and the 7200 rpm disk. On the majority of the software I use, word, excel, netscape, etc, I can't see a noticable difference between this machine and my 2.8 gigahertz Athlon XP desktop with 1 gig of ram and 120 gig 720 rpm disk with 8 meg of cache.

[JHEM]

Tim,

Personally, I'd max the RAM (which is 2GB BTW), install a 7200RPM HD and upgrade the CPU to 2.4GHz.

The unit would be eminently usable for 3 to 4 more years IMHO, especially as you have the X40 for road trips.

Just my $.02.

Regards,

James