[Dragonfire24]

I just bought a laptop from a friend of mine. Its about 2 years old. It's a Compaq Presario v5102nr series with a 1.8ghz sempron processor in it.

Mostly this laptop is going to be used for writing, but I was wondering about the performance. I own a desktop so I know what to expect from a desktop, but owning a latop is new to me. I did a full wipe and installed a fresh copy of XP, re-installed all the proper drivers, basically everything to get it up and running at 100%. Then I noticed this one problem that I wanted to ask about.

I noticed that when I tried to play a CD using either iTunes or Windows Media Player I couldn't really do much of anything else. In other words the laptop slowed down to a crawl and I couldn't even bring up the task manager to exit those programs.
I noticed I don't seem to have any problems when I rip the songs to iTunes as mp3s and just play them then.

My question is, Is that just a common thing among laptops? Or Could there be some hardware trouble involved? Or is just a sucky CPU? I just figured I would put this out there amonst people who know more about laptops than I do

[seahwk83]

Well, it comes with 512mb ram - buying more RAM will improve using multimedia apps and programs, 1 gig would help but you can go up to 2, if it is a long term investment and plan on keeping the laptop, upgrade to 2gb memory

Memory 512MB 333MHz DDR System Memory (2 Dimm)
Memory Max 2048mb

And also, your video memory is shared, meaning when you are using video, it is taking memory from your RAM, and of course with only the 512mb of ram installed, going to bog down system when using multimedia

Video Memory 128MB DDR (shared)

Go with 2gb RAM

[Dragonfire24]

Now if I remember right my friend who sold it to me had already replaced the 512 with a 1GB stick. I haven't actually opened up the memory slot yet to look at the ram and I seem to recal not seeing 1GB when looking at the properties of "My computer". I think it was reading about 800MB or so. I don't know if that has much significance or not.

I was thinking or adding more ram to it anyway but it's not really for me, its more for my best friend, who wants a laptop. I really bought it for her, but I have to get it running properly since I am the one who knows about computers.

[NeedKarma]

I still use an older version of Winamp to play CDs and mp3s. It uses very little resources and does everything I want it to do. I have an older laptop on which I dual boot XP and Xubuntu. In XP it's all about turning off services you don't need and making sure not much but the OS and antivirus runs at startup.

[ScottGem]

First the Sempron processor was AMD's economy chip series. So you have a pretty slow processor there. Throwing more RAM at it will help some. If you are seeing 800M of RAM, then its probably sharing the RAM with the video card. But this is never going to be a speedy machine. It has nothing to do with laptop vs desktop it has to do with the configuration of the laptop.

[Dragonfire24]

Neither me nor my girl are expecting much from this laptop, just some writing and listening to music and maybe some surfing. It works fine for that, except for what I mentioned about playing CDs. Works perfectly with playing mp3's, so I guess that I will just have to rip my CD's before I can play them on this thing. I can live with that.

I can see where that missing RAM is being shared with the video card. I checked out extra ram, which I could get another 1GB stick for about $40. But then again I better not lol. I ended up looking into more than just RAM, and if I upgrade that I am going to want to take out that sempron and stick in a 2.0 ghz Turion. Scotty, you might remember what happened when I bought that Compaq Presario Desktop from my cousin. Swapped out 256mb RAM for 1 GB, went from a 2.66 Celeron D to a 2.8ghz P4, put in an extra DVD burner and a new power supply. Once I started I couldn't stop, that is until I built my own PC LMAO.

Overall I'm pretty happy cause this isn't a bad laptop and I only paid $100 for it. I'm pretty sure that's a steal.