Upgrading Dell Vostro 1000, does it worth it?

[troyer1234567]

3400G has the graphics built into the CPU. One of AMDs older graphics technologies, Vega, but they are cramming into the CPU die. But that model is a desktop CPU.

Laptop APUs end in U or H and also have Vega graphics, but that doesn't mean that your particular laptop doesn't have a discrete GPU, depends on what it actually is.

how to find out?

 

[Eximo]

System info in Windows, service tag at the manufacturer's website. Device Manager.

 

[troyer1234567]

System info in Windows, service tag at the manufacturer's website. Device Manager.

it's ATI RADEON Xpress Series
so will it change if i change cpu or it is built in mb?

 

[Eximo]

What laptop are we talking about?

I'm guessing that is from system info, which is usually pretty generic about graphics cards. I thought you wanted to know what CPU/APU you had.

 

[troyer1234567]

What laptop are we talking about?

I'm guessing that is from system info, which is usually pretty generic about graphics cards. I thought you wanted to know what CPU/APU you had.

the laptop this thread is about, Dell Vostro 1000
and i know cpu is Sempron Mobile 3600+
and gpu is AMD Xpress (i don't know if its AMD Xpress 1150 or 200, HWInfo says it's 200 )

now, i want to know if i upgrade my cpu to AMD Turion X2 64 , would the gpu get upgraded too or not?

 

[Eximo]

Ah, you threw me for a loop referencing a recent CPU.

No upgrading the CPU won't upgrade the graphics, they are separate in that old of a system.

 

[troyer1234567]

Ah, you threw me for a loop referencing a recent CPU.

No upgrading the CPU won't upgrade the graphics, they are separate in that old of a system.

do u think Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare would work on my gpu?

 

[Eximo]

It might run, not sure it would be enjoyable. That is an old game, but that wasn't exactly the pinnacle of graphics cards when it was new.

 

[adrianeaston]

As I lay here waiting to go take care of the holidays for my kids, I was looking up some info on the vostro 1000. I've been playing with one recently, and came across this thread. I couldn't help but to recover my login info and comment, as there is some bad info in here.

My particular model has the dual core athlon TK-53, and 2GB RAM. I popped a crucial 240GB SSD in it and loaded Windows 10 Pro 64bit. It loads relatively quickly, but the CPU is quite often pegged at 100%. I was able to watch some YouTube videos, browse the web a bit and install some drivers and other software. (The radeon Xpress in there needed to have a Vista 64 bit radeon driver package installed as Windows 10 won't get it automatically. Without the radeon driver, you're stuck at 1024x768 instead of native 1280x800)

Trim is a function of the drive and operating system. It doesn't care what SATA interface version you have. I can confirm it is enabled and working on my Vostro 1000.

For the love of all that is good and holy, leave on the page file, and leave it at automatic. You WILL NOT wear out or break your SSD in any normal time frame. I still have my first ever SSD... an 80GB Intel X25-m. It was first installed in an Acer laptop with 4GB ram. I then upgraded that from Vista to 7 and ran it for 2 years while going to college for IT. I then pulled the drive and put it into a MacBook, wiped it and installed Mac OSX. Ran that for another couple years. It then went into a Core2Quad desktop for 2 years (formatted and Windows 7 reinstalled again). To this point, it had been my daily driver for 6 years or so. Wiped, formatted, used, re- used... at 80GB, it was almost always full, and I'd be moving data and programs on and off.

Today it's in my media center pc, windows 10 installed. Intel SSD toolbox says it's perfectly healthy. It is probably 13 years old, and my abuse of it is above and beyond what any normal user would have done to it.

Yes, SSDs can fail, but you're not going to wear out a Western Digital ssd with a bit of pagefile swapping over the span of 3-4 years, even if the computer only has 4GB RAM.

On the topic of your upgrade paths... 8GB DDR2 (2×4GB) is expensive and not worth it on this old platform. Stick to 4GB.

The Sempron has always been a bad CPU. The dual core TK-53 I have in my vostro would be better, but I wouldn't bother switching CPUs if I were you, unless one presented itself cheaply and you enjoy the whole tinkering process. The experience of the swap would be where you would get your value. This thing isn't a speed demon even with two cores...

Vostro win 10

 

[troyer1234567]

As I lay here waiting to go take care of the holidays for my kids, I was looking up some info on the vostro 1000. I've been playing with one recently, and came across this thread. I couldn't help but to recover my login info and comment, as there is some bad info in here.

My particular model has the dual core athlon TK-53, and 2GB RAM. I popped a crucial 240GB SSD in it and loaded Windows 10 Pro 64bit. It loads relatively quickly, but the CPU is quite often pegged at 100%. I was able to watch some YouTube videos, browse the web a bit and install some drivers and other software. (The radeon Xpress in there needed to have a Vista 64 bit radeon driver package installed as Windows 10 won't get it automatically. Without the radeon driver, you're stuck at 1024x768 instead of native 1280x800)

Trim is a function of the drive and operating system. It doesn't care what SATA interface version you have. I can confirm it is enabled and working on my Vostro 1000.

For the love of all that is good and holy, leave on the page file, and leave it at automatic. You WILL NOT wear out or break your SSD in any normal time frame. I still have my first ever SSD... an 80GB Intel X25-m. It was first installed in an Acer laptop with 4GB ram. I then upgraded that from Vista to 7 and ran it for 2 years while going to college for IT. I then pulled the drive and put it into a MacBook, wiped it and installed Mac OSX. Ran that for another couple years. It then went into a Core2Quad desktop for 2 years (formatted and Windows 7 reinstalled again). To this point, it had been my daily driver for 6 years or so. Wiped, formatted, used, re- used... at 80GB, it was almost always full, and I'd be moving data and programs on and off.

Today it's in my media center pc, windows 10 installed. Intel SSD toolbox says it's perfectly healthy. It is probably 13 years old, and my abuse of it is above and beyond what any normal user would have done to it.

Yes, SSDs can fail, but you're not going to wear out a Western Digital ssd with a bit of pagefile swapping over the span of 3-4 years, even if the computer only has 4GB RAM.

On the topic of your upgrade paths... 8GB DDR2 (2×4GB) is expensive and not worth it on this old platform. Stick to 4GB.

The Sempron has always been a bad CPU. The dual core TK-53 I have in my vostro would be better, but I wouldn't bother switching CPUs if I were you, unless one presented itself cheaply and you enjoy the whole tinkering process. The experience of the swap would be where you would get your value. This thing isn't a speed demon even with two cores...

Vostro win 10

hi
thank u for your comment
last night i bought AMD Turion X2 64 TL-58 and replaced my trash Sempron (i did it myself i watched a youtube video and done that) now Call Of Duty4 is palyable at 800600 resolution BUT i have a problem: in any game if i set resolution to anything below 1280800 the screen would be smalled in my laptop screen and won't get fullscreen even if i set it to fullscreen! not only it happens in games but also when i open Display Settings and set the resolution to any thing below 1280*800 the screen becomes smaller, HELP! what should i do to fix that?

another problem, i kinda feel like my ATI driver is not correct, what driver did u download for your Vostro 1000? i have windows 7 64bit please share a download link to latest ati driver for my laptop thank u

 

[PeterMuellerr]

For the love of all that is good and holy, leave on the page file, and leave it at automatic.

The worst advice I've ever heard. While flash memory itself can tolerate high temperatures (the data simply rots away more quickly), a flash drive does not love high temperatures, and goes into readonly at best and becomes useless at worst once it is overheated. Guess what happens when it's constantly swapping and the casing does not transport the heat away properly. Good luck with that.

 

[USAFRet]

The worst advice I ever heard. While flash memory itself can tolerate high temeratures (it simply loses date more quickly), a flash drive does not love high temperatures, and goes into readonly at best and becomes useless at worst once it is overheated. Guess what happens when it's constantly swapping and the casing does not transport the heat away properly. Have fun with that.

1. Given sufficient RAM, pagefile use is minimal.
2. What temps have YOU seen on any of your SSDs, and in what use case?

In any of mine, I've not seen anything above 62C. This, on an NVMe with no heat sink, under a sustained 600GB write transfer.

 

[PeterMuellerr]

1. Given sufficient RAM, pagefile use is minimal.
2. What temps have YOU seen on any of your SSDs, and in what use case?

1. The laptop in question has insufficient RAM.
2. I indeed saw the internal temperatures in a laptop rising to around 80°C – 90 °C everywhere (due to a failure in cooling), in particular near the drive — and then the laptop turned itself off. Good for the drive, less so for the unsaved work. I once saw an 2,5" SSD (if think Samsung, but don't nail me down on this) inside — it was simply a board with soldered chips without any internal heatsinks whasoever. Between the board and the plastic casing, you had air except for the fixing parts (screws). This is definitely not a very good cooling solution.

 

[USAFRet]

1. The laptop in question has insufficient RAM.
2. I indeed saw the internal temperatures in a laptop rising to around 80°C – 90 °C everywhere (due to a failure in cooling), in particular near the drive — and then the laptop turned itself off. Good for the drive, less so for the unsaved work. I once saw an 2,5" SSD (if think Samsung, but don't nail me down on this) drive inside — it was simply a board with soldered chips without any internal heatsinks whasoever. Between the board and the plastic casing, you had air except for the fixing parts (screws). This is definitely not a very good cooling solution.

And given insufficient RAM, defining the pagefile as 'small' will reduce performance even more.
It will get used anyway.

But using the pagefile, no matter what size, is no different than just using the drive for whatever.
Read/write is read/write.

But leaving the pagefile as "System Managed" is not the worst thing ever.

 

[PeterMuellerr]

And given insufficient RAM, defining the pagefile as 'small' will reduce performance even more.

Almost right. It's better to have a zero-size pagefile rather than a small positive-size pagefile. On a low-RAM laptop, having a small swap, e.g., 1 MiB, is worse than having a pagefile of 0 bytes.
In the former case, the OS swaps all the time, and having 1 MiB extra will not make a huge difference for the OS and applications: if they run out of memory with RAMSIZE + 0 bytes, they are highly likely to do so with RAMSIZE + 1 MiB. The adverse side effect is that the SSD gets hot with the circumstances described above. In the latter case, the OS and the applications run out of memory or offer reduced functionality almost as often as in the former case. The only adverse side effect is that they fail infinitesimally more often, and the two huge positive side effects are that if they fail, they fail quicker, and the laptop is way, way cooler and faster because of the absence of any swapping at all.

But leaving the pagefile as "System Managed" is not the worst thing ever.

Well, I admit I exaggerated that leaving the pagefile on was the worst advice I've ever heard. (In my life, I heard even worse advices; they were, though, unrelated to laptops.)

I don't have a low-RAM system at my disposal now. However, if anyone who has only 1–2 GiB RAM and a disposable SSD in their laptop is reading here and would wish to compare the performance and the reliability of, say, Windows 10 with and without swap, feel free …

 

[USAFRet]

Zero is worse than tiny which is worse than sufficient.

If the system or laptop has insufficient cooling, the SSD will get how whatever. Pagefile or no.
Just general use.

 

[PeterMuellerr]

Zero is worse than tiny which is worse than sufficient.

I disagree with the first inequality. It should be reversed.

If the system or laptop has insufficient cooling, the SSD will get how whatever. Pagefile or no.
Just general use.

General use for typical office tasks (say, type in a text in a word processor or watch a movie) is less often than for swap. Indeed, if you type in a text, it's only autosaving of the text that goes to the drive every once in a while. If you watch a locally stored movie, at most the position in this movie is autosaved, if at all. (Of course, sometimes Windows autosaves housekeeping of its own business, but it's relatively rare.) The rest are read operations from the OS and the applications, which are quicker and use less power (hence, generate less heat) than write operations (cf. http://www.cse.psu.edu/~buu1/papers/ps/park-jsa11.pdf).

As for the second inequality, it would be (or is) true if a user had (or has) an infinite amount of time to wait until an operation finishes. In reality, a user loses patience quickly on a low-RAM system with swap.

 

[USAFRet]

Depends...worse for what?

I suspect we shall agree to disagree.

 

[PeterMuellerr]

Depends...worse for what?

When I said that having a 1-MiB swap is worse than having a 0-byte swap, I meant that the user would wait longer for success or failure of an OS operation or an application operation, and that the SSD would be more exposed to the risk of damage.

I suspect we shall agree to disagree.

Alright. Yes, until someone tests…

 

[USAFRet]

When I said that having a 1-MiB swap is worse than having a 0-byte swap, I meant that the user would wait longer for success or failure and the SSD would be more exposed to the risk of damage .

Alright.

I should have specified...I was referring to overall performance of the system.

pagefile, large or small, is not going to kill any normal SSD.

 

[PeterMuellerr]

pagefile, large or small, is not going to kill any normal SSD.

That's where we also probably have to agree to disagree (for the special case of low RAM in laptops).

As an aside, it occurred to me that an SSD may be preferable to an HDD in a laptop for some folks, but for a completely different reason: if you have a laptop rather than a desktop, you probably wish to move it from time to time, and whenever you move it when it's on, an HDD stops (if the acceleration is small) or the HDD head crashes onto the drive (if the acceleration is large). Each stop/start of an HDD measurably reduces its lifetime. However, if your laptop is stationary, this reason goes away.

 

[USAFRet]

That's where we also probably have to agree to disagree (for the special case of low RAM in laptops).

All my house systems (except for the NAS), desktop and laptop, have been SSD only for almost a decade.
Interestingly, none of the drives have died due to excessive write cycles.

 

[PeterMuellerr]

All my house systems (except for the NAS), desktop and laptop, have been SSD only for almost a decade.
Interestingly, none of the drives have died due to excessive write cycles.

However, I guess you always had plenty of RAM, haven't you?

 

[USAFRet]

However, I guess you always had plenty of RAM, haven't you?

Systems from 4GB to 32GB.

 

[troyer1234567]

guys i upgraded ram to 4 gb, replaced my old 320gb HDD with a new 240 gb SSD , and replaced that useless Sempron 3600+ with Turion X2 64 Tl-58.
Now my laptop fully boots in less than a minute and i can play COD4:MW on lowest resolution, i also cleaned the Fan and now it doesn't get so hot (my SSD used to get to 55-59 degrees but now it gets 52 53 while i play COD4:MW for an hour)
so if anybody has this laptop or anything like this, i highly recommend u to upgrade your laptop as it's cheap and also makes your laptop reallyyyyy fast and usable

@USAFRet @PeterMuellerr before upgrading cpu, i always used to get LOW MEMORRY warning due to the pagefile setting (i had set that to 100 mb maximum lol) but now i don't get that warning at all and also my laptop is reallyyyyyy faster and reallyyy better i'm so happy