Dimension 4550 AGP Video Card Recomendations
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From: William R. Walsh on 7 Jul 2010 10:36 Hi! > Thanks William for all the information. You are welcome, and I wish you the best of luck in your upgrade. > ATI Radeon HD 4650 1 GB card from Gigabyte, with OpenGL > 2.1 and DirectX 10.1 for about $72, only about $25 more than > a 512MB card. Should be here tomorrow. It's amazing what you can get these days, even for an older system. The way they do this is through an "AGP to PCI Express" bridge chip. PCI Express to PCI versions exist as well...I recently put a fancy- pants nVidia board with 1GB worth of video memory in a Compaq Deskpro EN SFF box when the onboard video failed. It worked perfectly and showed no signs of causing problems with the PSU. > The power connector and PS had me a bit worried I wouldn't worry about it too much. At one time, Dell was using very good power supplies in their equipment (they still do, for the OptiPlex systems). Your system should be just fine. > The ATi drivers and CCC are another story, and I will post back > with my results, or come begging for help! Thanks again, Pat CCC requires the .NET Framework to be installed, which you may or may not already have. If you do, update it to the latest 3.5 release and install all patches. If you don't, ATI offers a download that consists only of the core drivers that you need to use the card, and this does not require .NET. In fact, you should almost certainly download the latest drivers from the ATI web site. If you can, do that before you install the card, so they will be handy. That way you will have the latest and greatest drivers with the newest bug fixes in place. William
From: Pat Conover on 8 Jul 2010 01:39 "William R. Walsh" <wm_walsh(a)hotmail.com> wrote in message news:8ba02034-adb9-4798-b658-1c3a296dc309(a)y4g2000yqy.googlegroups.com... Hi! > Thanks William for all the information. You are welcome, and I wish you the best of luck in your upgrade. > ATI Radeon HD 4650 1 GB card from Gigabyte, with OpenGL > 2.1 and DirectX 10.1 for about $72, only about $25 more than > a 512MB card. Should be here tomorrow. It's amazing what you can get these days, even for an older system. The way they do this is through an "AGP to PCI Express" bridge chip. PCI Express to PCI versions exist as well...I recently put a fancy- pants nVidia board with 1GB worth of video memory in a Compaq Deskpro EN SFF box when the onboard video failed. It worked perfectly and showed no signs of causing problems with the PSU. > The power connector and PS had me a bit worried I wouldn't worry about it too much. At one time, Dell was using very good power supplies in their equipment (they still do, for the OptiPlex systems). Your system should be just fine. > The ATi drivers and CCC are another story, and I will post back > with my results, or come begging for help! Thanks again, Pat CCC requires the .NET Framework to be installed, which you may or may not already have. If you do, update it to the latest 3.5 release and install all patches. If you don't, ATI offers a download that consists only of the core drivers that you need to use the card, and this does not require .NET. In fact, you should almost certainly download the latest drivers from the ATI web site. If you can, do that before you install the card, so they will be handy. That way you will have the latest and greatest drivers with the newest bug fixes in place. William William, I learn more here with every visit. Well the card arrived today from Newegg, very fast from their NJ warehouse to SNJ. Of course the DVI to VGA adapter was not in the box, just the card, manual, and driver cd. Gigabyte also apparently got tired of including the 6-pin Y adapter to power the card from two 4-pin power plugs, and now there is just one 4-pin plug on the card. But, they mounted it on the top of the card and if your case is a bit tight, it won't close. Poor design to be sure. Looks like I have enough room though. The Fan appears very well built, but extra large and takes up the adjoining PCI slot. Lucky for me nothing in the adjacent slot, I left that one open for cooling the old video card ;-) Plus this old puter has lots, and lots of expansion slots, they don't make em like that anymore. Everyone seems to have problems with CCC, but I think most don't have .Net installed, as you suggested, which is needed for CCC to work right. I have ..Net 3.5 SP1 installed, but always get the .Net 1.xx won't install on Windows Updates. Everything seems to work fine, so I never did the arduous task of uninstalling all .Net versions, and reinstalling all .Net versions again starting with version 1 and working my way up to 3.5. M$ sure got this .Net stuff all screwed up! I have searched for updated drivers, been there and done that before. Some say to use the Gigabyte drivers since they are the card maker and others say to use ATI's latest drivers. I have one AGP hotfix (10-6_agp-hotfix_xp32_dd_ccc.exe), and CCC drivers (10-6_xp32_dd_ccc_enu.exe) both direct from ATI. I also have the Gigabyte drivers (vga_driver_ati_xp_8.66.exe) downloaded. Interestingly, the drivers on the CD say Version 2.0 display drivers for XP/Vista/Windows 7, so maybe the Win7 sticker means these are the latest and greatest. One review on newegg said to install the AGP hot fix first, then the drivers. Not sure at this point which ones to use or install first. Any suggestions from the group? Anyway, I need to get some work done on this old machine and probably won't tackle this potential fiasco until the weekend. Any suggestions on the correct drivers or order of installation would be Greatly Appreciated! Now to find my Dell LCD DVI cord. Thanks again, Pat
From: powrwrap on 20 Jul 2010 10:35 > On Jul 4, 9:55 pm, Ben Myers <ben_my...(a)charter.net> wrote: > Memory upgrades remain the most cost-effective way to improve speed of a > computer. How much faster? It depends on your work habits and the > software you use. > Your mileage from a memory upgrade may vary, but you will not be > disappointed. as others suggest, a cleanup with CCleaner and a defrag > with Defraggler (better than Windows defrag) will help too... Ben Myers Update. I've had the 1 GB stick installed for about a week now and yes, there is a difference. Total memory is now 1.5 GB. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say it is almost twice as fast as before. I don't see the busy hourglass so much anymore. Switching between applications is much better. Working with photographs is faster. I haven't tried any video conversions yet, so can't comment on that but I figure that is more dependent on the CPU than memory. Even web browsing is faster. I'm not yelling "C'MON! What are you DOING!" anymore. LOL. It was a nice, cheap upgrade.
From: Ben Myers on 21 Jul 2010 00:59 On 7/20/2010 10:35 AM, powrwrap wrote: >> On Jul 4, 9:55 pm, Ben Myers<ben_my...(a)charter.net> wrote: > >> Memory upgrades remain the most cost-effective way to improve speed of a >> computer. How much faster? It depends on your work habits and the >> software you use. > >> Your mileage from a memory upgrade may vary, but you will not be >> disappointed. as others suggest, a cleanup with CCleaner and a defrag >> with Defraggler (better than Windows defrag) will help too... Ben Myers > > Update. I've had the 1 GB stick installed for about a week now and > yes, there is a difference. Total memory is now 1.5 GB. If I had to > put a number on it, I'd say it is almost twice as fast as before. I > don't see the busy hourglass so much anymore. Switching between > applications is much better. Working with photographs is faster. I > haven't tried any video conversions yet, so can't comment on that but > I figure that is more dependent on the CPU than memory. Even web > browsing is faster. I'm not yelling "C'MON! What are you DOING!" > anymore. LOL. It was a nice, cheap upgrade. > Excellent! Glad you are satisfied. I sell a lot of memory upgrades to people locally... Ben
From: Bob Villa on 5 Aug 2010 06:22
On Jul 4, 9:37 am, "Pat Conover" <pub...(a)comcast.net> wrote: > Hi All; > > Well, I know I shouldn't have, but I went ahead and upgraded my old trusty > Dimension 4550 with a 2.4 GHz P4 processor and 533MHz bus from 768MB of RAM > to 2GB of RAM. Dell said it would only take 1GB, and that upgrade was not > worth the effort. But I was on the Crucial site the other day, and ran the > memory advisor program that said it would take up to 2GB of memory. So $100 > and two 1GB sticks of DDR PC3200 memory later, this old workhorse is running > like a new machine! Based on the recommendations in this group, I have also > been running Defraggler, and CCleaner, which also helps pep things up. I > also run Lars Headerer's (SP?) ERUNT (Emergency Recovery Utility for NT) aka > system restore for adults, and NTREGOPT (NT Registry Optimizer) defrag for > the registry. Lean and mean programs, that I highly recommend for your > toolkit. Google ERUNT to go to Lars home page. > > Anyway on to my question, I am now running a lowly 64MB NVidia MX420 AGP > video card, and one program that I would like to rum as a local copy won't > install with that card. Nice enough to tell me, before I installed the > program and had random lockups, etc. The specific requirements that my card > doesn't meet are: > > "24-bit capable graphics accelerator An OpenGL 2.0 or higher compliant video > card is required, with at least 32 MB of video memory, however 256 MB of > video memory or higher is recommended." > > So what AGP video card would you recommend based on the above. I think my > AGP port is only 2X or something like that and not 4X. > > Thanks, Pat If anyone is going to upgrade memory on their old box...this may be the time. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820146545&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL080510&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL080510-_-EMC-080510-Index-_-DesktopMemory-_-20146545-L07D I can't (the wife sees all the bills!) *L* bob |