Which hardware component should I upgrade?

[pepperjinks]

I received my friend's old HP Pavillion dv9000 after he bought a new laptop. It has 1GB RAM, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core processor, a 120GB HDD, and a GeForce Go 6150 graphics card.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 7; I'd love for it to be able to run Ubuntu without slowing to a crawl every so often.

I have $150 available to put toward any hardware upgrades. What should I replace? I know having 4GB RAM would help, but besides that, what should I do? Also, should I buy off Newegg or somewhere else?

 

[scottiemedic]

I had one of those and RAM is the way to go. You can also replace the slow wireless mini-PCIe card to wireless N.

And I only buy from newegg, with the exception of the wireless, which I do eBay for (find a 'local' seller)

 

[pepperjinks]

Okay, thank you! Which brand should I aim for, or does it matter? Also, should I buy a single 4GB stick or 2 2GB sticks?

 

[scottiemedic]

Doesn't matter, they will all be within a couple bucks of each other. Look for free shipping then flip a coin

 

[geogolem]

Other than RAM the next best thing to do would be to throw in an SSD.... but I don't know if it would be worth it in your budget range etc.

 

[geogolem]

You could get a crucial M4 128GB SSD for about $120 or a 256GB for $200...

I don't know if your laptop has enough space for an SSD and an HDD... so if I were to get an SSD I would make sure I got one big enough for my needs or that I could still make use of the HDD as a storage drive.

 

[pepperjinks]

Yeah, I haven't actually opened it up yet so I don't know if there's space for two drives. I'll be able to do that soon, though.

Is there a possibility of upgrading the GPU or would I need to replace the PSU to do that?

 

[fpoon]

Laptop GPU's usually aren't upgradeable; even if they are, the CPU would bottleneck it.

 

[scottiemedic]

I'm pretty sure the 9000 series has a place for 2 drives, one on each side underneath.

 

[pepperjinks]

Best answer selected by pepperjinks.