Which hardware component should I upgrade?

pepperjinks

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Oct 7, 2011
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I received my friend's old HP Pavillion dv9000 after he bought a new laptop. It has 1GB RAM, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core processor, a 120GB HDD, and a GeForce Go 6150 graphics card.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 7; I'd love for it to be able to run Ubuntu without slowing to a crawl every so often.

I have $150 available to put toward any hardware upgrades. What should I replace? I know having 4GB RAM would help, but besides that, what should I do? Also, should I buy off Newegg or somewhere else?
 
Solution
I had one of those and RAM is the way to go. You can also replace the slow wireless mini-PCIe card to wireless N.

And I only buy from newegg, with the exception of the wireless, which I do eBay for (find a 'local' seller)

scottiemedic

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Feb 10, 2010
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I had one of those and RAM is the way to go. You can also replace the slow wireless mini-PCIe card to wireless N.

And I only buy from newegg, with the exception of the wireless, which I do eBay for (find a 'local' seller)
 
Solution

geogolem

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Mar 8, 2012
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You could get a crucial M4 128GB SSD for about $120 or a 256GB for $200...

I don't know if your laptop has enough space for an SSD and an HDD... so if I were to get an SSD I would make sure I got one big enough for my needs or that I could still make use of the HDD as a storage drive.
 

pepperjinks

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Oct 7, 2011
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Yeah, I haven't actually opened it up yet so I don't know if there's space for two drives. I'll be able to do that soon, though.

Is there a possibility of upgrading the GPU or would I need to replace the PSU to do that?