Need help on computer upgrades...?

Question

I have an HP Pavilion a705w, that is a bit out date. I was hoping to upgrade the video card "Graphics" card, memory, and hard drive on it. I was wondering exactly what i needed to know to actually get the stuff to put into it. Any help would be greatly appreciated......

Answer 1

Bad news first... you only have PCI slots to work with. http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/docum...

HP doesn't list the wattage of your power suuply. You need to know what the wattage is, as that will be your main limitation on the graphics card you buy. Either you buy a card that will work with your present PSU, or you buy a new PSU at the same time.

Here's a link to Newegg's PCI cards, ranked by price. A 6200 is a safe bet. The 2400PRO would make a good card, but it requires 300W on your PSU.

Answer 2

Well, you've got a couple of options. First, with replacing the processor, your board will support up to a 2.8ghz Northwood core Pentium 4 witha FSB of 533mhz. you should be able to find some of them on ebay for a low price. (at the time of this writing newegg.com has it listed but does not have any instock). it will support up to 2gb of pc2700 ddr ram. but unfortunately will only support pci graphics cards. ati makes some ok graphics cards based on the x1000 and HD 2000 gpu's that are availible in PCI (NOT PCI-E), but don't expect to get alot of performance out of them because of the bandwidth limits of the pci bus. your motherboard does not support SATA so your best bet is to watch for deals on 500gb drives, every now and again you will see some on sale on newegg for under $100. my personal preference is seagate, they have have 5yr warranty instead of Western Digital's 3yr. and in personal experience i have not had a seagate drive fail. but have replaced several WD drives with seagate drives when the WD drives would fail.

so all in all, with a graphics card ($75-$100), Proc ($75), HDD ($100), memory ($70), +s&h ($20) your looking at about $300 for an upgrade. If your considering upgrading the OS to Vista, the upgraded computer should be capable of running it, but the upgrade will run about another $100-$150.

Answer 3

Before you get it, make sure that your graphics card is replaceable and not permanently in your computer like mine is. Also, if your anywhere near a store called 'Best Buy', there should be computer service inside called 'The Geek Squad', I've bet you have heard of it. Just ask them, they will answer all your questions and will have everything for your computer wants and needs.

Hope this helps!