**The Importance of Processor and RAM Upgrades**

When it comes to upgrading older machines, there are several components that can benefit from an upgrade. The average processor these days, especially with dual cores and quad cores and six cores, is considered a crucial part of any machine. It's worth noting that the folks in the industry have moved away from 2 GB of RAM as the standard installation, and instead, we're seeing 4 GB or more installed on most machines.

The average machine coming out these days comes with processors like Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD quad-core processors, which can benefit from a memory upgrade. However, it's worth noting that reaching diminishing returns at a certain level is crucial to consider. For example, 4 GB of RAM may not be enough for some users, especially those who are running multiple applications simultaneously.

On the other hand, hard drive upgrades can significantly improve the user experience. The average notebook coming out these days with a 5400 rpm hard drive can see a performance boost with a 7200 rpm hard drive or even an SSD (Solid State Drive). In fact, upgrading to a larger capacity drive with better air density and overall performance can enhance the user's experience more than a memory upgrade.

**The AMD Fusion Developers Summit Giveaway**

Unfortunately, we're still not quite ready to announce a hardware giveaway that we always have. However, we promise that it will be coming soon. We've never let our readers down in the past, so stay tuned for that announcement. In the meantime, we're excited to share with you that AMD has given us 25 free passes to the AMD Fusion Developer Summit.

This event is normally priced at $300 per ticket, but AMD is providing us with these passes to give to some of our favorite hot hardware readers. Users will have access to all the top minds in the industry, including software developers and engineers who are working on next-gen technology. They'll also get to see demos of new technologies that will be exposed through AMD's APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

We're looking for users from various locations around the world to join us at this event. Since it's being held in Bellevue, Washington, we know it can be tough for some of our Canadian or East Coast readers to make it there. That's why we're only selecting 25 winners from a pool of interested users who want to attend.

To enter, simply shoot us a note with your name and location. We'll compile the list of interested users and select 25 winners based on their responses. The lucky winners will be able to join us at the event and experience all that AMD has to offer.

**The Importance of Hard Drive Upgrades**

Upgrading the hard drive in an older machine can significantly improve performance and overall user experience. The average notebook coming out these days with a 5400 rpm hard drive is likely to see a performance boost with a 7200 rpm hard drive or even an SSD.

SSDs, in particular, have become increasingly popular due to their speed and reliability. However, they can be more expensive than traditional hard drives. If you're looking for ways to improve your machine's performance without breaking the bank, upgrading to a larger capacity hard drive with better air density and overall performance may be a more affordable option.

In addition to improved performance, a hard drive upgrade can also help extend the life of an older machine. By using a faster hard drive, you'll be able to load applications and files more quickly, which can help reduce wear and tear on the machine's internal components.

**Conclusion**

When it comes to upgrading older machines, there are several components that can benefit from an upgrade. Processor upgrades, in particular, have become increasingly important as the industry moves towards more powerful processors. RAM upgrades, on the other hand, may not be as necessary for some users, especially those who are running multiple applications simultaneously.

However, hard drive upgrades can significantly improve performance and overall user experience. By upgrading to a faster hard drive or even an SSD, you'll be able to load applications and files more quickly, which can help reduce wear and tear on the machine's internal components.

We hope this article has provided some valuable insights into the importance of processor and RAM upgrades, as well as the benefits of hard drive upgrades. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we'll continue to explore the world of technology and all its wonders.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis episode of two and a half geeks is brought to you by data robotics drobo you may be familiar with drobo for the home user but for small to medium-sized companies check out drobo.com business for simple sophisticated storage solutions for the enterprise coming up on two and a half geeks we're talking about the z68 chipset from intel an htpc called the ass rock and a whole lot more the bar has been set wicked fast it's rocked in the benchmarks we're gonna up the ante uh a little bit processing power i kind of understand this welcome to two and a half geeks i'm maya zakra alongside two boneheads from hot hardware dot com you know dave alte villa and marco chapetta how you guys doing did you hear what he called this before the bonehead comment no you guys know i love you but i can't say that stuff on air i'll be slapped with the harassment suit again let's just talk about technology instead shall we good idea all right no more feelings it's too mushy let's talk about intel launching the z68 chipset for sandy bridge marco you guys changed the lineup just before we went on air which means i have no idea what we're talking about why don't you explain this to me sure although this was in the old lineup too so you didn't do your homework but what the the z68 um is basically the latest chipset for intel's sandy bridge platform and it's it's sort of a combination of the p67 and the h67 when sandy bridge first hit users were kind of forced to choose between the p67 which had all the enthusiast features like cpu overclocking and what have you but no support for quick sync or the h-67 which supported intel's integrated graphics and gave users access to quick sync now with the z6 you sort of have the best features of both chipsets kind of mushed into one with the addition of a really cool feature called intel smart response technology which is a new ssd caching technology that'll boost system performance now is this the same chipset that was actually in the imax like a week earlier before their official launch and if that's the case how is it performing you know i'm not sure if this is what's in the new imax i haven't followed that storyline i wouldn't be surprised if it was because it's uh technically the same piece of silicon as the p67 or h67 so it's likely that that is what apple is using um but performance is good if you if you discount the smart response technology and you just measure system performance versus the p67 or h67 it's right on par there's no real changes you know at the chip level but if you factor in the smart smart response technology you can get you know up to a 40 boost in system performance and sometimes a three four five or six x boost in hd transfer speeds so what kind of clock speed we're talking about how many cores are on these these sandy bridge stuff is the same six and four core stuff or they're eight core what's going on so well the chipset there are no cores in the chipset but as far as the processors the z68 supports it's it's all lga 1155 sandy bridge based processors which on the desktop consists of an array of dual and quad cores i'm in the mobile space there's also dual and quad cores and eight core chips will be coming down the line but probably will use a different socket no word on those just yet speaking of mobile let's talk about even smaller mobile computing how about the samsung infused 4g i know dave i think you just happen to have have one there uh i do what do you want to tell us about that actually looks like a large phone it's going a 4.3 inch amoled yes yeah four and a half inch and uh it is a beauty um four and a half inch uh really large screen uh thin okay you know about nine millimeters thick on its edge um eight megapixel camera on the back with flash but the real feature of this phone is samsung's super ammo led plus display that is absolutely gorgeous one of the nicest displays we've ever seen in a phone and i'm sure this webcam shot is not doing it justice but really nice phone um samsung's hummingbird 1.2 gigahertz hummingbird processor under the hood so a little bit of goose and clock speed now one gig was the initial hummingbird clock speed um so yeah really nice uh good multimedia capability with uh samsung's um graphics core the is it a power uh power vr car under the hood marco in in the humminbird chip i think so i believe it's a derivative but i'm not certain yeah something of that ilk and so yeah good multimedia processor and a really big screen that is just gorgeous now it's a samsung phone so it's probably got android i assume it's not one of those windows phone seven ones is it no no it's absolutely android 2.2 good question and samsung does a really nice job if you can take a look here of skinning android 2.2 froyo with you know their sort of light skin you know sort of uh theme if you will that just really nice bright colors big icons good contrast and you know not a lot of bloatware a little bit on there of course you get customizable home screens that you can set up you just pinch and you can take a look there's a number of home screens there and so you know a really nice really nice phone for the money i want to say it's 2.99 on contract uh excuse me 199 on contract and um you know we really liked it a lot we're gonna put it through the benchmark paces in the uh days ahead here and have a full review coming to you uh soon apart from the screen and the samsung scanning is there anything that really sets this thing apart from all the other android phones uh oh it's 4g did we mention that i don't know maybe the title yes infuse 4g does it actually use hspa plus or is it lte yeah it's actually it's att's 4g network so it's not lte um what it's an ah and you know we we have to do some testing with att's 4g network out here in the boston area we have been taking verizon's lte network for a ride on a couple of phones like the the thunderbolt um and boy does that network kick some serious butt i mean the download speeds are like you know cable modem class kind of performance um we'll see what at t can put out here in boston um but we haven't been impressed so far with what we've seen from att's 4g but hey it's it's still faster than 3g and hopefully att will get to work on that network performance you know i don't know if i want to go out and go test a phone like you're going to do i probably want to sit on my butt and watch tv you know would be a good idea for that an htpc maybe an azeroth hd pc with uh nvidia 3d vision tech marco do you know anything about anything like that i do i i know a lot about it because i have been reviewing well i finished the review but this thing was in-house for weeks on end while i was setting up a a proper home theater and i got intimately familiar with it with the machine the full name is actually the asrock vision 3d with nvidia 3d tv play technology awesome awesome little home theater pc uh asrock used all mobile components in the machine so you have a mobile cpu mobile gpu uses so dims nice small form factor mobile hard drive a slim slot load blu-ray player it kind of looks like you know a beefed up mac mini if i was to compare it to some sort of white box machine but just perfectly suited for the home theater literally took this thing out of the box plugged in the hdmi cable plugged in the network cable plugged in power five minutes of wizards later just to set up the 3d on my samsung tv and i was up and running and i got to say the experience um was nearly perfect throughout really a really nice home theater pc now you're saying it's kind of like a mac mini now how is it on power consumption and they didn't do anything crazy like try to make it difficult to disassemble did they no actually the complete opposite power consumption was uh was phenomenal that it peaked at under 70 watts so that's you know nearly double what say uh an amd brazos based home theater pc pulled but we're still talking very low power consumption that there's one fan in the system to dissipate that heat and you can barely hear it when it spins up it's really quiet and disassembling the machine is super easy there's actually a button right on the back you just push one button and the top panel pops right off there are a few more screws underneath to gain access to the components inside but you're talking your two minute disassembly process easy to upgrade you know if you wanted to and just you know just a really solid job the machine it really couldn't have been easier to use now if you were to compare it to say a media streamer where you know you just plug it in and you know access your network shares and play stuff it's a little more complex than that because it is a windows environment but the advantage of the windows environment for home theater pc is you can basically play any kind of file you want if the machine's not ready to play it there's codex out there where you can just install and then play it so i i was really really impressed with the machine i liked it a whole bunch now it's got some kind of nvidia 3d tech how did that actually play out did you enjoy the 3d stuff could it actually handle the the amount of processing involved for 3d uh picture yeah it has plenty of horsepower you're talking an intel core i3 processor and nvidia gt 425 gpu in there and it was it was a completely painless experience so that the 3d setup it was literally just a matter of running a wizard on the tv you know and making sure you you select the proper image for each eye it took like two minutes and then the 3d playback of blu-rays was handled by powerdvd or nvidia includes their own player for standalone video files and 3d photos and i found actually the playback to be better than a set-top box i also have a samsung 3d blu-ray player which is perfectly fine but the image quality was simply better from the gpu and the home theater pc there's just you know more processing going on more cleaning up more cleaning up of the images and all around just a better 3d experience with that said it's still you know 3d on a tv so if you don't like you know the slight dimming of color and if it gives you a headache if you're one of the people that gets a headache from the the active shutter glasses you still have to contend with that but it's probably one of the better 3d experiences i've had but dave so you really you found this to be actually literally better than a standalone blu-ray player yeah absolutely you know unless you're sprinting for a super high-end plus got you know doing all the additional post processing to clean up the images perfectly um a powerful home theater pc with a good gpu is going to be better in most cases you know what that's impressive i'm getting the hd over to my pc i'm going to get a new htpc but a new study is saying that apparently people have this itch to replace pcs every four years dave could you tell us about the study so yeah we have an article up studies show that users experience a four year itch and uh this was a study that was taken and put out by crucial.com the memory company as you may know them uh manufacturers of all kinds of computer memory and uh they did a poll of users and you know 47 of the users that responded said they were dissatisfied with their computer in some way the the chief complaint was that it was slow and uh let's see what else we can tell you they also said that 50 of the users will replace their computer within that four year time span um and so it seems to us that you know that's almost you know a needless sort of thing uh and and the folks are crucial would argue that if they only upgraded their memory um they would perhaps be more satisfied with their computing experience and not have that itch every four years no way this is a study from crucial the guys who sell ram and they're suggesting that you buy more ram instead of i guess replacing your pc i mean it is actually cheaper to upgrade your rams one of the first things you should do if you have an older pc uh would you actually do you agree with what they're what their findings do you think that just simple upgrades like that would be enough or do you think within four years that it really is time to just junk your machine and start over uh i i think unless you are a a real power user um chuck in your machine every four years probably isn't necessary you probably can upgrade some components and get some additional life out of it uh let's face it the average processor these days especially when you're talking about dual cores and quad cores and six cores i mean um you know there's a ton of horsepower under the hood uh and i would argue that you know agreed the folks are crucial it's you know for real old machines for older machines from previous generation architectures where you know two gig perhaps was the standard install of ram i mean they talk about a dell dimension machine that had 128 meg of ram i don't think you can buy you know in the last you know four years you probably haven't bought any machine that had that little bit of memory installed but you know where we're coming from a generation of maybe two gig installations to now where the average installation especially with um you know intel sandy bridge processors and amd quad core processors that are coming with four meg plus installed or excuse me four gig plus installed on the machine um you know i think a memory upgrades you're gonna probably reach you know diminishing returns at a certain level certainly at the 4 gig and up level a hard drive upgrade and the folks are crucial might want to retarget that study and look at ssds a hard drive upgrade on the other hand could really improve your experience and the average notebook coming out with a 5400 rpm hard drive um you know definitely could see a performance boost to a 7200 rpm notebook hard drive or of course an ss an ssd if you can you know fork up the money for that certainly a bit more expensive position same thing at the desktop you know the average hard drive that gets full of user data upgrading to a larger capacity drive that you know has better aerial density and better you know general performance overall than in the initial drive in your machine will enhance your experience probably significantly more than a you know something over the 4 gig market memory upgrade let's talk about contests giveaways invites who wants to cover this this week's hint or actual information marco i think i think i'll do it this week okay so unfortunately we're still not quite ready to announce a hardware giveaway that we always have the wheels turning one is definitely coming we promise we have never let you down in the past so stay tuned for that um but we're in full swing with the amd fusion developers summit giveaway as we mentioned in the last podcast amd gave us 25 free passes to the event normally it would be 300 to register for one of these all access passes and at the at the amd fusion developer summit users are going to have unfettered access to all the top minds at amd software developers that are there uh talking about the apps that will be built to expose the apus that uh amd is building plus there's gonna be tons of hints that next gen technology is gonna be a very cool show and we're gonna have 25 of our favorite hot hardware readers there with us so uh come by the site uh the post is going to be live before this goes live hopefully and you'll see uh how quick and easy it will be to get your hands on one of those tickets you said your favorite if you look at some of the agenda items as well there's lots of hands-on breakout demos so should be some really cool tech demos for folks to come see as well so how are you picking who gets invited or do they have to be your favorite people do they have to send you things no we're it's actually we're just gonna it because the event is up in in bellevue washington uh we know it's gonna be tough for you know say some of our uh canadian or east coast readers to get there um it's just the tickets that are up for grabs not travel to the event so um if anybody's going to be in the area simply shoot us a note and once we've compiled the list of everybody that wants to go we'll select 25 from that list and they're going to show up so write nice things people and be nearby because they're not going to hang with us too yeah i guess that could that's a plus or negative it's kind of hard to poor people yeah thanks don't forget you can find everything we talked about over at hothardware.com that's a nice site you know they got lots of information they could explain things to even somebody as silly as me so that's it's good stuff over there definitely worth checking out or you can go around the web by the way if you want to do that social thing you go to facebook.com hot hardware or go to twitter.com hardware if you want that really small headline kind of thing maybe you want a video youtube.com hot hardware vids or if you're still on dig and you're with that last guy dig.com hot hardware i think that does it for our fine little show we'll see everybody next week thanks for stopping bythis episode of two and a half geeks is brought to you by data robotics drobo you may be familiar with drobo for the home user but for small to medium-sized companies check out drobo.com business for simple sophisticated storage solutions for the enterprise coming up on two and a half geeks we're talking about the z68 chipset from intel an htpc called the ass rock and a whole lot more the bar has been set wicked fast it's rocked in the benchmarks we're gonna up the ante uh a little bit processing power i kind of understand this welcome to two and a half geeks i'm maya zakra alongside two boneheads from hot hardware dot com you know dave alte villa and marco chapetta how you guys doing did you hear what he called this before the bonehead comment no you guys know i love you but i can't say that stuff on air i'll be slapped with the harassment suit again let's just talk about technology instead shall we good idea all right no more feelings it's too mushy let's talk about intel launching the z68 chipset for sandy bridge marco you guys changed the lineup just before we went on air which means i have no idea what we're talking about why don't you explain this to me sure although this was in the old lineup too so you didn't do your homework but what the the z68 um is basically the latest chipset for intel's sandy bridge platform and it's it's sort of a combination of the p67 and the h67 when sandy bridge first hit users were kind of forced to choose between the p67 which had all the enthusiast features like cpu overclocking and what have you but no support for quick sync or the h-67 which supported intel's integrated graphics and gave users access to quick sync now with the z6 you sort of have the best features of both chipsets kind of mushed into one with the addition of a really cool feature called intel smart response technology which is a new ssd caching technology that'll boost system performance now is this the same chipset that was actually in the imax like a week earlier before their official launch and if that's the case how is it performing you know i'm not sure if this is what's in the new imax i haven't followed that storyline i wouldn't be surprised if it was because it's uh technically the same piece of silicon as the p67 or h67 so it's likely that that is what apple is using um but performance is good if you if you discount the smart response technology and you just measure system performance versus the p67 or h67 it's right on par there's no real changes you know at the chip level but if you factor in the smart smart response technology you can get you know up to a 40 boost in system performance and sometimes a three four five or six x boost in hd transfer speeds so what kind of clock speed we're talking about how many cores are on these these sandy bridge stuff is the same six and four core stuff or they're eight core what's going on so well the chipset there are no cores in the chipset but as far as the processors the z68 supports it's it's all lga 1155 sandy bridge based processors which on the desktop consists of an array of dual and quad cores i'm in the mobile space there's also dual and quad cores and eight core chips will be coming down the line but probably will use a different socket no word on those just yet speaking of mobile let's talk about even smaller mobile computing how about the samsung infused 4g i know dave i think you just happen to have have one there uh i do what do you want to tell us about that actually looks like a large phone it's going a 4.3 inch amoled yes yeah four and a half inch and uh it is a beauty um four and a half inch uh really large screen uh thin okay you know about nine millimeters thick on its edge um eight megapixel camera on the back with flash but the real feature of this phone is samsung's super ammo led plus display that is absolutely gorgeous one of the nicest displays we've ever seen in a phone and i'm sure this webcam shot is not doing it justice but really nice phone um samsung's hummingbird 1.2 gigahertz hummingbird processor under the hood so a little bit of goose and clock speed now one gig was the initial hummingbird clock speed um so yeah really nice uh good multimedia capability with uh samsung's um graphics core the is it a power uh power vr car under the hood marco in in the humminbird chip i think so i believe it's a derivative but i'm not certain yeah something of that ilk and so yeah good multimedia processor and a really big screen that is just gorgeous now it's a samsung phone so it's probably got android i assume it's not one of those windows phone seven ones is it no no it's absolutely android 2.2 good question and samsung does a really nice job if you can take a look here of skinning android 2.2 froyo with you know their sort of light skin you know sort of uh theme if you will that just really nice bright colors big icons good contrast and you know not a lot of bloatware a little bit on there of course you get customizable home screens that you can set up you just pinch and you can take a look there's a number of home screens there and so you know a really nice really nice phone for the money i want to say it's 2.99 on contract uh excuse me 199 on contract and um you know we really liked it a lot we're gonna put it through the benchmark paces in the uh days ahead here and have a full review coming to you uh soon apart from the screen and the samsung scanning is there anything that really sets this thing apart from all the other android phones uh oh it's 4g did we mention that i don't know maybe the title yes infuse 4g does it actually use hspa plus or is it lte yeah it's actually it's att's 4g network so it's not lte um what it's an ah and you know we we have to do some testing with att's 4g network out here in the boston area we have been taking verizon's lte network for a ride on a couple of phones like the the thunderbolt um and boy does that network kick some serious butt i mean the download speeds are like you know cable modem class kind of performance um we'll see what at t can put out here in boston um but we haven't been impressed so far with what we've seen from att's 4g but hey it's it's still faster than 3g and hopefully att will get to work on that network performance you know i don't know if i want to go out and go test a phone like you're going to do i probably want to sit on my butt and watch tv you know would be a good idea for that an htpc maybe an azeroth hd pc with uh nvidia 3d vision tech marco do you know anything about anything like that i do i i know a lot about it because i have been reviewing well i finished the review but this thing was in-house for weeks on end while i was setting up a a proper home theater and i got intimately familiar with it with the machine the full name is actually the asrock vision 3d with nvidia 3d tv play technology awesome awesome little home theater pc uh asrock used all mobile components in the machine so you have a mobile cpu mobile gpu uses so dims nice small form factor mobile hard drive a slim slot load blu-ray player it kind of looks like you know a beefed up mac mini if i was to compare it to some sort of white box machine but just perfectly suited for the home theater literally took this thing out of the box plugged in the hdmi cable plugged in the network cable plugged in power five minutes of wizards later just to set up the 3d on my samsung tv and i was up and running and i got to say the experience um was nearly perfect throughout really a really nice home theater pc now you're saying it's kind of like a mac mini now how is it on power consumption and they didn't do anything crazy like try to make it difficult to disassemble did they no actually the complete opposite power consumption was uh was phenomenal that it peaked at under 70 watts so that's you know nearly double what say uh an amd brazos based home theater pc pulled but we're still talking very low power consumption that there's one fan in the system to dissipate that heat and you can barely hear it when it spins up it's really quiet and disassembling the machine is super easy there's actually a button right on the back you just push one button and the top panel pops right off there are a few more screws underneath to gain access to the components inside but you're talking your two minute disassembly process easy to upgrade you know if you wanted to and just you know just a really solid job the machine it really couldn't have been easier to use now if you were to compare it to say a media streamer where you know you just plug it in and you know access your network shares and play stuff it's a little more complex than that because it is a windows environment but the advantage of the windows environment for home theater pc is you can basically play any kind of file you want if the machine's not ready to play it there's codex out there where you can just install and then play it so i i was really really impressed with the machine i liked it a whole bunch now it's got some kind of nvidia 3d tech how did that actually play out did you enjoy the 3d stuff could it actually handle the the amount of processing involved for 3d uh picture yeah it has plenty of horsepower you're talking an intel core i3 processor and nvidia gt 425 gpu in there and it was it was a completely painless experience so that the 3d setup it was literally just a matter of running a wizard on the tv you know and making sure you you select the proper image for each eye it took like two minutes and then the 3d playback of blu-rays was handled by powerdvd or nvidia includes their own player for standalone video files and 3d photos and i found actually the playback to be better than a set-top box i also have a samsung 3d blu-ray player which is perfectly fine but the image quality was simply better from the gpu and the home theater pc there's just you know more processing going on more cleaning up more cleaning up of the images and all around just a better 3d experience with that said it's still you know 3d on a tv so if you don't like you know the slight dimming of color and if it gives you a headache if you're one of the people that gets a headache from the the active shutter glasses you still have to contend with that but it's probably one of the better 3d experiences i've had but dave so you really you found this to be actually literally better than a standalone blu-ray player yeah absolutely you know unless you're sprinting for a super high-end plus got you know doing all the additional post processing to clean up the images perfectly um a powerful home theater pc with a good gpu is going to be better in most cases you know what that's impressive i'm getting the hd over to my pc i'm going to get a new htpc but a new study is saying that apparently people have this itch to replace pcs every four years dave could you tell us about the study so yeah we have an article up studies show that users experience a four year itch and uh this was a study that was taken and put out by crucial.com the memory company as you may know them uh manufacturers of all kinds of computer memory and uh they did a poll of users and you know 47 of the users that responded said they were dissatisfied with their computer in some way the the chief complaint was that it was slow and uh let's see what else we can tell you they also said that 50 of the users will replace their computer within that four year time span um and so it seems to us that you know that's almost you know a needless sort of thing uh and and the folks are crucial would argue that if they only upgraded their memory um they would perhaps be more satisfied with their computing experience and not have that itch every four years no way this is a study from crucial the guys who sell ram and they're suggesting that you buy more ram instead of i guess replacing your pc i mean it is actually cheaper to upgrade your rams one of the first things you should do if you have an older pc uh would you actually do you agree with what they're what their findings do you think that just simple upgrades like that would be enough or do you think within four years that it really is time to just junk your machine and start over uh i i think unless you are a a real power user um chuck in your machine every four years probably isn't necessary you probably can upgrade some components and get some additional life out of it uh let's face it the average processor these days especially when you're talking about dual cores and quad cores and six cores i mean um you know there's a ton of horsepower under the hood uh and i would argue that you know agreed the folks are crucial it's you know for real old machines for older machines from previous generation architectures where you know two gig perhaps was the standard install of ram i mean they talk about a dell dimension machine that had 128 meg of ram i don't think you can buy you know in the last you know four years you probably haven't bought any machine that had that little bit of memory installed but you know where we're coming from a generation of maybe two gig installations to now where the average installation especially with um you know intel sandy bridge processors and amd quad core processors that are coming with four meg plus installed or excuse me four gig plus installed on the machine um you know i think a memory upgrades you're gonna probably reach you know diminishing returns at a certain level certainly at the 4 gig and up level a hard drive upgrade and the folks are crucial might want to retarget that study and look at ssds a hard drive upgrade on the other hand could really improve your experience and the average notebook coming out with a 5400 rpm hard drive um you know definitely could see a performance boost to a 7200 rpm notebook hard drive or of course an ss an ssd if you can you know fork up the money for that certainly a bit more expensive position same thing at the desktop you know the average hard drive that gets full of user data upgrading to a larger capacity drive that you know has better aerial density and better you know general performance overall than in the initial drive in your machine will enhance your experience probably significantly more than a you know something over the 4 gig market memory upgrade let's talk about contests giveaways invites who wants to cover this this week's hint or actual information marco i think i think i'll do it this week okay so unfortunately we're still not quite ready to announce a hardware giveaway that we always have the wheels turning one is definitely coming we promise we have never let you down in the past so stay tuned for that um but we're in full swing with the amd fusion developers summit giveaway as we mentioned in the last podcast amd gave us 25 free passes to the event normally it would be 300 to register for one of these all access passes and at the at the amd fusion developer summit users are going to have unfettered access to all the top minds at amd software developers that are there uh talking about the apps that will be built to expose the apus that uh amd is building plus there's gonna be tons of hints that next gen technology is gonna be a very cool show and we're gonna have 25 of our favorite hot hardware readers there with us so uh come by the site uh the post is going to be live before this goes live hopefully and you'll see uh how quick and easy it will be to get your hands on one of those tickets you said your favorite if you look at some of the agenda items as well there's lots of hands-on breakout demos so should be some really cool tech demos for folks to come see as well so how are you picking who gets invited or do they have to be your favorite people do they have to send you things no we're it's actually we're just gonna it because the event is up in in bellevue washington uh we know it's gonna be tough for you know say some of our uh canadian or east coast readers to get there um it's just the tickets that are up for grabs not travel to the event so um if anybody's going to be in the area simply shoot us a note and once we've compiled the list of everybody that wants to go we'll select 25 from that list and they're going to show up so write nice things people and be nearby because they're not going to hang with us too yeah i guess that could that's a plus or negative it's kind of hard to poor people yeah thanks don't forget you can find everything we talked about over at hothardware.com that's a nice site you know they got lots of information they could explain things to even somebody as silly as me so that's it's good stuff over there definitely worth checking out or you can go around the web by the way if you want to do that social thing you go to facebook.com hot hardware or go to twitter.com hardware if you want that really small headline kind of thing maybe you want a video youtube.com hot hardware vids or if you're still on dig and you're with that last guy dig.com hot hardware i think that does it for our fine little show we'll see everybody next week thanks for stopping by\n"