Did a refurb today on a decent HP Pavilion Slimline model with AMD Athelon x2 processor and standard 1GB RAM . On-board video was blown, so I added a 512MB Sparkle NVIDIA GEFORCE card and 2GB of RAM to give it some decent speed. The internals were pretty cramped (see pics below), but the casework is really solid and I was able to unmount all internal components without a hitch. I would have preferred to go with 4GB on this unit, but at roughly $30 per stick for 2 two gig sticks, I settled for 2GB worth of crucial memory. After testing, the card and memory perform well in a win7 environment, but there is a noticeable difference in speed.
Still the build / upgrade was stable, and I was able to install a nice suite of freeware programs and other utilities in short order. System lag was tolerable while installing programs but still there is a noticeable difference from the recommended 4GB. Once I had a chance to install all programs and tweak a few settings, I noticed that the Athelon x2 was handling pretty well, and most applications sprang to life moments after executing them on RocketDock.
 |
| First look at the internals. |
 |
| Added a low profile bracket to the card. |
 |
| It took a little work to get to the RAM slots, Optical drive sits directly above them. |
 |
| Side view after cleaning |
 |
| Front view |
-Wayne
