I have recently made a layaway purchase of a Dell laptop 1420 14.1in. I can make upgades to it if needed but I am not sure whether I need to. It is for personal home use and for college. I plan to have music, pictures, and obviously documents stored on it. I am not a gamer. However I do like it to be quick, but doesn't need to be super fast. Only those who truly know computers respond. Please help!!

What the computer has...

1.73 GHz Processor

1 GB RAM

40 GB Hard Drive

Internal 56K modem

What OS will you be running? What model processor?

Thank you for your response. First, what do you mean by OS? And I believe the CPU that will be preinstalled is a Intel Core 2 Duo. Please respond again. Any thoughts are helpful.

OS means operating system...

Windows xp... ME... vista..

At those specs, I strongly doubt you're running vista.

If you're running xp, then overall, it looks OK... however if you're planning to use it for the next 4 years in college, you may want to upgrade your ram and hard drive space.

I would suggest upping your ram to about 2 gb and perhaps just getting an external hd.

Thank you again. It will be operating under Windows Vista Home. And as far as college goes, I use a junk drive for most of my documents and other files.

Hmm a 40G drive is very small by today's standards. And 1G of RAM is entry level for Vista. If you are planning on storing music on it, I would bump up the drive to at least 80G. Most retail laptops today start with 160G drives. Hard drive storage is relatively cheap these days.

I assuming you mean Jump drive also knowns as Thumb drive, Flash drive or USB drive. If you don't want to bump up the hard drive, you can get an external drive of 80G or more that's very portable.

I made a call today based on some research I did myself lastnight and am not going to be running vista as of right now and will be running XP. I may opt to upgrade the hard drive later as well as the ram. But due to the fact the company that I am making the purchase from charges a fair amount for the upgrades on both the RAM and Hard Drive I will most likely do it myself later. Is this fairly easy to do? And or can I take it to computer store to have this done?

UPDATE ON WHAT IS BEING RUN...

Intel Celeron (not the Intel Duo 2)

1 GB RAM

40 GB Hard Drive

Will this be sufficient for now?

I run vista with 1gb of ram it's not to bad but I would recommend a larger hard drive to upgrade to even one twice as big shouldn't be that much money so I think that would well worth it

Ahh that makes a lot more sense. I was surprised anyone would put Vista on a 40G machine. Frankly I would NOT recommend that machine. The Celeron processor is a very low end single core processor. It will not give good battery life and you can't upgrade the processor. I would definitely NOT recommend running Vista on a Celeron. And adding more RAM would be somewhat of a waste.

I agree that adding ram would be somewhat of a waste, but it never hurt... and it doesn't cost too much.

Installing ram is very easy... just the ram slot on your laptop and then just insert ram.

Why would adding RAM be some what of a waste?

Because a Celeron is such a low power chip