You are pretty much maxed out, I mean, you could upgrade the processor, but that's only gaining you .1Ghz, hardly worth it...people have upgraded the RAM to 2GB on the I8200 I believe though, so that's also an option, but you probably won't notice much of a difference with that unless you're doing very memory intensive work.

I agree with CSmith - you are pretty much topped out.  I actually upgraded my Inspiron 8200 from 512MB to 1024MB - ran a bunch of benchmarks with both configurations.  The end result was that there was no significant performance boost jumping from 512MB to 1024MB - at least with an Insprion 8200, running Windows XP Professional, and using 3dMark2001SE, PCMark2002, and the built in benchmark for the trial version of UT2003.  When reviewing the benchmark results closely I could even see a slight performance drop with the 1024MB configuration for certain tests, although the performance drop was not statistically significant to the overall test results. 

Needless to say I returned the memory to Crucial.  As the Windows OS becomes more advanced and application programs are written to take advantage of more memory then I suspect going beyond 512MB will start to make a significant difference, but currently I don't see much reason to go crazy with memory upgrades.

Because you sound concerned with performance I suspect you already defrag your hard drive regularly.  I have mine scheduled to automatically perform a defrag very early in the AM each day.

Best of luck!

Defragging your hard drive will certainly not kill it.  Not sure where you came up with that one. 

Keeping fragmentation on your hard drive at a minimum has been well documented to help with performance over a highly fragmented hard drive.  By performing a defrag regularly the actual time spent on the defrag is minimized.  Since mine is defragged every day it completes the operation in minutes.  If anything not defragging your hard drive can cause extra ware and tear over time on your hard drive.  Look at it this way - if your hard drive is very fragmented then accessing one file can cause the read/write head assembly to bounce all over the platter trying to read in all the fragments associated with a single file.  If the drive is not fragmented then the read operation can proceed with minimal read/write head movement over the platter, thereby causing much less wear and tear on the unit.

 

 

defraging it everyday wont do u any good but it will kill your hard drive a lot faster. - i turned off my swap file when i had the 5400rpm drive, but now with the 7200 i forgot to turn it back on so i dont know whether it would be quicker than having no swap or having it on.

Dell Latitude C840 BIOS A12
15" Samsung ASV UXGA 1600x1200
(Was Sharp until I freaking dropped it...)
Intel Pentium4 2.5GHz-M
512MB PC2100 Crucial
512MB PC2100 Dane Elec
Hitachi 60GB 7200rpm Primary
IBM 60GB 5400rpm Modular
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Matshita 24x CDRW Modular
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Dell TrueMobile 1300 802.11b/g Mini-Pci

X200, pIIIm 800, 384MB, 30GB 4200, TM1150

when i said kill it i meant wear it out.  the most you are supposed to defrag is once a month.  a disk really only gets fragmented after major installs or uninstalls.

Dell Latitude C840 BIOS A12
15" Samsung ASV UXGA 1600x1200
(Was Sharp until I freaking dropped it...)
Intel Pentium4 2.5GHz-M
512MB PC2100 Crucial
512MB PC2100 Dane Elec
Hitachi 60GB 7200rpm Primary
IBM 60GB 5400rpm Modular
HLDS 8x DVD-Rom Fixed
(Soon to be 2x Toshiba DVD-R/-RW)
Matshita 24x CDRW Modular
Teac 1.44MB Floppy Modular
Sanyo 66Whr Battery
Sony 66Whr Battery
Nvidia Geforce4 440 Go 64MB
(52.16 Forceware with Teraphy's Modified Inf)
Dell TrueMobile 1300 802.11b/g Mini-Pci

X200, pIIIm 800, 384MB, 30GB 4200, TM1150

i stand corrected  now time to go correct the source

Dell Latitude C840 BIOS A12
15" Samsung ASV UXGA 1600x1200
(Was Sharp until I freaking dropped it...)
Intel Pentium4 2.5GHz-M
512MB PC2100 Crucial
512MB PC2100 Dane Elec
Hitachi 60GB 7200rpm Primary
IBM 60GB 5400rpm Modular
HLDS 8x DVD-Rom Fixed
(Soon to be 2x Toshiba DVD-R/-RW)
Matshita 24x CDRW Modular
Teac 1.44MB Floppy Modular
Sanyo 66Whr Battery
Sony 66Whr Battery
Nvidia Geforce4 440 Go 64MB
(52.16 Forceware with Teraphy's Modified Inf)
Dell TrueMobile 1300 802.11b/g Mini-Pci

X200, pIIIm 800, 384MB, 30GB 4200, TM1150

Wow.... I come back to see if anybody read my post, and I realize, "I wrote that whole rant??" But, yeah, in any case, there's no real need to defragment until fragmentation affects system performance. (Wow, summarizing my entire rant in one sentence.... I really should start drinking less caffeine. )

Actually, I'm afraid anettis is right. Defragmenting the hard drive more than "necessary" isn't going to wear the drive out any faster than normal use. You are also wrong about major (un)installs being the largest factor in fragmentation. Of all things, simply surfing the Internet is the largest cause of hard drive fragmentation. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of small image, text, HTML, and other files stored in the browser's cache as they're being downloaded for your viewing pleasure as you click various links wandering about on the imformation superhighway. The OS starts to write a file in the first open space it can, which is often not large enough to evenly hold the file being written. (This is where the difference between size, size on disk, and slack filesystem space come into play, but I will leave that for some other time.) This, as you obviously already know, is files being fragmented. In fact, major uninstalls do not necessarily fragment the drive. By deleting a large contiguous chunk of data, you open up a nice large space that can properly hold many files without fragmenting them.

Let's go back to the reading a file example presented by anettis. Say I have a video file, about 2 GB in size. (Pretty small for what I do, but it'll work.) This is currently not stored on my hard drive, but I need to put it on the hard drive, so I have a copy to show at a presentation. Let's also say that I have not defragmented in 3 weeks and have done a lot of Internet browsing, researching information used compiling this video and its presentation. Since I did not and have not defragmented the drive, this video file is now strewn across the hard drive in 548 fragments. That means the drive must perform at least 548 more seek operations to play back the file, each time it is played. Had I defragmented before I transferred the file onto the system's hard drive, it would be in one contiguous segment. And since it is already in one fragment, defragmenting the drive would do nothing to the file itself. Total seek operations per playback: ONE.

Defragmenting the drive once a month was originally Microsoft's arbitrary default for its Scheduled Tasks. Also, a modern hard drive's MTBF (Mean/Average Time Between Failures) ranks in the hundreds if thousands of hours. Defragmenting the drive more than once a month will not noticeably shorten the life of the drive. Defragmenting on a daily basis, while most likely excessive, will not wear out the drive any faster than running a system with high levels of fragmentation.

I defragment weekly. I also present large amounts of video on a weekly basis. (About 6 hours, or 3 GB worth compressed.) My weekly defragmentation occurs just before my normal presesntation time. Just to see what would happen for the purpose of this thread, I did not defragment before the presentation this week. As a result, the video files were fragmented, and the playback quality dropped as a result of the system having to devote more time to reading the file. (I also had some serious explaining to do to the people viewing the presentation.)

Defragment whenever you make large changes to the file system (install/uninstall a large program, create/delete a large number of files, etc.) for sure, but otherwise, when you defragment makes little difference on the life of your drive; it will still most likely outlive the service lifespan of the system.

Well stated nanakivii!

:-)

Here is another tidbit I find interesting - it seems that both Microsoft and Executive Software (makers of the built-in defragger in Windows) lead people to believe the built in defragger is a manual process.  Executive Software is obviously trying to get people interested in its retail defragger called DISKEEPER.  However it is simple enough to add the following task to the Scheduled Task list within XP to completely automate the process:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\defrag.exe c: /f

I have defrag set to execute each night at 4:10 am.  This way my hard drive starts out each day squeaky clean, so to speak.  I realize this is probably overkill, but since it is automated what the heck.  Actually people who use the DISKEEPER defragger typically have a defragger process running in the background all the time.  Granted most of the time it is doing nothing, but it is there to spring into action if defragmentation becomes a problem.  I find that the windows XP defragger (at least for NTFS) works very well - much better than the defragger that came with Windows 98.

Tony

 

Message Edited by anettis on 11-20-2003 01:57 PM

Message Edited by anettis on 11-20-2003 01:58 PM

for some reason my comp seems really slow.  for example when i open a 700mb movie it takes forever to load and stuff...  proggies take forever to load.

Dell Latitude C840 BIOS A12
15" Samsung ASV UXGA 1600x1200
(Was Sharp until I freaking dropped it...)
Intel Pentium4 2.5GHz-M
512MB PC2100 Crucial
512MB PC2100 Dane Elec
Hitachi 60GB 7200rpm Primary
IBM 60GB 5400rpm Modular
HLDS 8x DVD-Rom Fixed
(Soon to be 2x Toshiba DVD-R/-RW)
Matshita 24x CDRW Modular
Teac 1.44MB Floppy Modular
Sanyo 66Whr Battery
Sony 66Whr Battery
Nvidia Geforce4 440 Go 64MB
(52.16 Forceware with Teraphy's Modified Inf)
Dell TrueMobile 1300 802.11b/g Mini-Pci

X200, pIIIm 800, 384MB, 30GB 4200, TM1150