Should I upgrade?

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1 comment, last by hplus0603 16 years, 10 months ago
I recently purchased a Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc. I could have purchased a more powerful laptop and a tablet for the same price but I didnt want a desktop replacement and I liked the idea of drawing directly on the screen(graphics, taking notes). It comes with 1.73ghz centrino processor, 2mb L2, 512m ram, 60gb sata hdd and a geforce go 6600 128mb graphics card. I have ordered a extra gig for $40 to bring it up to 1.5gb total. I considered buying two gig sticks but I thought 1.5gb should be enough, right? My question is should I spend a extra $160 to replace the 1.73ghz cpu with a 2.13ghz one? I plan to use the computer for photoshop work (textures, concept art, comic strips), zbrush, some light model work and game programming. I've spent about $600 already, Is the extra 400mhz worth it?
There is an "I" in team if you spell it wrong.
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Thank you all for your dozens of responses, I could not get to them all(cough). But I have come to a decision for anyone who is interested(no one). I found a computer surplus website that sold a 2ghz centrino for $44 which is around $100 less than what you can get it for on ebay. I'm a bit saddened that they didn't have a faster cpu but on a plus note they also had slim bay batteries which only set me back $55(they cost 250+ on ebay) so now I have 6hrs of battery life. Trading 130mhz for 3 extra hours of use and $70 bucks in my pocket seemed like a good trade to me. I still might splurge on the second gig of ram.
There is an "I" in team if you spell it wrong.
First: I would get two equal memory modules, if your Centrino chipset supports dual-channel memory. That will increase your memory throughput. However, if it's of the mobile variety, it may not support dual-channel, and then it doesn't matter as much. However, more memory is still useful, because that lets PhotoShop save more in RAM, and use the hard disk less.

Before you buy a new CPU, make sure that the CPU is socketed in your existing tablet, and can be removed/replaced. If it's soldered, you're going to be quite unhappy trying to remove it :-)
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