HP dc7700 convertible minitower: worth upgrading?

[magellan]

This system has a Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86 Ghz), 2 GiB of DDR2, 320 GiB HDD,365 Watt PSU. I only use it for work projects.

The big issue w/it is that if I go to websites of any complexity and firefox eats up more than a GiB of memory the system begins swapping (i.e. to the swapfile partition), CPU usage skyrockets and the system becomes unusable.

Would it be worth it to upgrade the memory to 8 GiB of DDR2? I'm not even sure if this system even supports 2 GiB
DDR2 DIMM's. The HP manual says it supports up to 8 GiB of DDR2 so it has to support 2 GiB DIMM's right?

 

[EarthDog]

Worth it is up to you...

If it supports 8GB, I'd assume it supports 2GB sticks as that is less than what would make 8GB since 4+4= 8.

 

[Lochekey]

What version of Windows are you running, can it utilize more ram? It may be worth getting an Ssd if you can't get more ram. It would help the system all around and make the page swaps faster.

 

[magellan]

What version of Windows are you running, can it utilize more ram? It may be worth getting an Ssd if you can't get more ram. It would help the system all around and make the page swaps faster.

I'm not running Windows on it, but CentOS.

The IGN websites slow the system to a crawl, so does pcgamer.

There doesn't seem to be much of a CPU upgrade path for this system, Pentium-D's and core 2 duos are it. I'm guessing even the
fastest Pentium D's @ 3.73 GHz wouldn't even be much of an improvement over the e6300.

It has an e6300 Core 2 duo in it running @ 1.86 GHz and the best CPU listed for this model is a e6700 @ 2.66 GHz.

I'm not even sure if has a standard ATX PSU or if it's some sort of proprietary design.

 

[knoober]

I wish I had seen this a few days ago when it was posted. I've got one of these boards out in the shed. I cannot remember what exact chip I had in it but it was a 3-ish Ghz C2D that needed a software workaround to get full speed out of it (check up forums and you will find it). I did have 4 x 2gb of ram in it as well. I simply decided that having to press a button to get the other half of my proc speed was more than I wanted to do, and began my adventure into better hardware with the purchase of a used Crosshair II and a set of ddr2 dominators with a low clocked phenom ii.

Long story short : it will run a 3ghz C2D and 8g of ram. It ran smooth enough for what it was. I like my currrent rig better of course