About Lauren Bennett Expertise I am a computer science major and my dad is an Electric Engineering, so my life has revolved around computers. For as long as I can remember, I have been buying and selling computers. I tend to travel a lot, so I have always had a laptop. I have bought 5 of them for myself, and bought around 30-40 for friends and family. I have dealt with the good and the bad of various version and brand names. If you are in need of buying a laptop, feel free to contact me and I'm sure I will be able to guide you into purchasing the laptop that will be the best fit for you. I will custom build you computers for you to choose from so you can get an exact idea of what to go and buy when you do it yourself and so that you have an exact price. However, I am in the USA and am only knowledgeable about computers here in the US. I do not know about foreign currency or the quality of computer brand names outside the US.
Experience B.S. in Computer Science. Buying and selling for years. Assisting friends/family.
Question QUESTION: hi laurean,
i have a dell inspiron 6000, 2 gb of ram and the processor is 1.73 ghz. i use it for architectural drawings on autocad and sketch up. it seems rather slow, and wants to crash frequently when i'm editing drawings in sketch up. is it possible to get a stand alone graphics card for it, and which type would be best. the sales team at dell are meant to be getting back in touch with me, but they keep trying to flog me a new computer and i am reluctant to pay money to speak to the technical advisors. i hope you can advise me, i just want to be able to run programmes without feeling frustrated by the lack of speed,
thanks
bets
ANSWER: if you have an integrated video card, there isn't really much you can do. however, if you have a non-integrated video card, you can upgrade it. so first you'll have to let me know what type of video card you have right now
it may also be a bit due to architecture software being pretty heavy software, especially if you have a lot of stuff open. the new dual core processors would help out a ton with that.
i just sold my dell insprion 9300 for $800 and bought a new dell laptop for $966 and it had 256 MB video card and a dual core processor : )
let me know about the video card though, and we'll go from there!
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QUESTION: Hi Lauren,
thanks so much for your fast response.
I'm just looking at my invoice from dell which lists the computer's components and it looks like the following relates to the graphics card:
intel media accelorator 900 graphics up to 128mb shared system memory~intel media accelorator 900 graphics up to 128mb shared system memory.
hmmm i don't know why it states that twice.
thanks again
betsy
Answer That's an integrated video card, which is the default in pretty much most laptops. You can't replace it, but it is a lot cheaper because of the small size of laptops (costs a lot to fit in an actual separate video card).
So if you want to upgrade your video card you'll have to buy a new laptop
Sorry to have to bring bad news :(
do you travel a lot? a desktop would suit your best, if possible. it'd be bigger, cheaper, and faster. my laptop and desktop cost the same and my desktop is twice as fancy as my laptop. and you could probably get decent money from your laptop.
something with a 256 MB graphics card, 2 GB of RAM, and a dual core processor would probably have you grinning ear to ear while working :)
let me know - i can try to build you either a new laptop or desktop for as cheap as possible with what you need.
