USB 2.0 and Memory

[djshawn]

I'll ask 2 questions:

1...I have an older HP Pavillion Laptop with an AMD Athlon 2200+ processor. It has 2 USB 1.1 ports. Is it possible to upgrade these ports to USB 2.0? If not, is there a way I can add USB 2.0 to this system? It has a firewire port but too bad there's not many uses for it.

2...The system has 512 MB of RAM. Is it worth paying the cash to double the memory? I mainly use the system for internet and music recording and processing.

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Mr5oh]

There are a couple of different ways to add USB 2.0. I can not say for sure though whether using an adpater or PCMCIA card to get USB 2.0 will affect performance or not.

512 MB of RAM is obvisuly more than enough for web/office stuff. With the music processing, upgradeing may help.

What I would do is open up task manager, or system monitor (depending on your OS), and watch and see how much RAM your PC eats up while processing music. I have found 90% of the stuff I do, doesn't even use up 512 MB RAM, much less the 1 gig that I have (Don't do music processing or video editting and such).

My Desktop: <A HREF="http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc.html" target="_new">http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc.html</A>

 

[Crashman]

You can't upgrade ports from 1.1 to 2.0. You could add a PCMCIA card with USB 2.0, but I'm not sure what the transfer rate for PCMCIA is.

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