Aunts Computer

19 years ago

After Randy's reply, that I copied and emailed her along with responses from the HP forum, and the goofy response I got from HP support (the rumors are true concerning HP support...its as bad as Dell's or what Dell's used to be a couple of years ago) she took the s7700n out of her cart.

We now have the Pavilion A1740N its looks good. But this video card, I can't relate to. I figured out that it too is integrated, but that's about all my poor brain can decipher:

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 32MB dedicated graphics memory

Can she add a video card later on if need be?

Networking, Connectivity & Expansion:

For expansion, this desktop has three PCI slots (two available), one PCI Express slot (available), two 5.25-inch external bays (one available), one external 3.5-inch bay (occupied), one internal 3.5-inch bay (occupied), and one HP Pocket Media Drive bay (available). It comes with a built-in floppy drive.

The unit seems pretty nice, at an unbelievable price...got my eyes wide with worried concern (if its too good to be true...), the Amazon page link is below (she likes to shop at Amazon-they do have some good deals now and then, I would prefer she shopped at HP but this is OK).

marf

Here is a link that might be useful: HP Pavilion A1740N Desktop PC at Amazon

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Comments (3)

theroselvr
19 years ago
Should be able to with the pci express slot
randy_ca
19 years ago
marf, confusing huh.
I'm guessing this is a 256MB intregrated card, which is good, the 32MB dedicated is way more compared to what most of us have.
It does have DirectX 9 3D hardware acceleration, someday DirectX 10 will be the thing, but it's good enough to run the Vista Premium and get all the WOW effects.
an integrated Intel GMA 950 video/graphics card with 32 MB of dedicated video RAM (and up to 224 MB shared with system memory)
224 + 32 = 256MB

It looks like a nice machine and I guess it would be a toss up between the 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 dual-core processor vs the 2.0 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ dual-core processor on the other machine.
You can look at it this way, you're getting a 320 GB Hard Drive and 2 GB RAM - great.

Yea, if I had money, I'd get a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX or GTS 640MB PCI-Express Video Card and stick it in a slot. : )
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marthapartha
Original Author
19 years ago
Thanks roselvr, so a PCI Express is like a regular slot...being a notebook owner (and only a notebook owner) all of this looks like ancient Greek to me, and I do not know anything about ancient Greece.

Hi Randy!

These new video cards...I'm going to have to take a tutorial on them because I'm lost, and it is not the easiest to get quick info on them, or I got to start using a different search engine. It used to be so simple and so straight-forward.

This entire adventure has been exasperating and confusing. This started out about three months ago over getting a new hard drive for that old HP PC desktop from 1997 with a 6GB hard drive and 64MB of RAM. My aunt saves all the info I send her, and that's how she was able to pick out this machine on her own.

Its very impolite to ask or state any woman's age or weight. But my 74 year old aunt is looking at laser mice and cruising the deals at GOGAMER.

As the HP support tech replied in the email:

"I would like to inform you that I wish to believe that the above information will be helpful to you."

What a road trip this is turning out to be.

What prompted the dumping of the HP s7700n PC was the heat factor. No one had heard about the wide screen res problem on the HP forums, but they had heard about the heat the shoe boxed sized computer emitted.

HP support said that a 128MB graphics card wouldn't support a widescreen format...which sounded odd to me because I have 64MB integrated graphics card and I have used a 1440 X990 native res on my 17" laptop for almost three years. They also informed me that HP monitors don't overheat, and they weren't aware of monitor overheating which is an answer to questiont that I never asked. So apparently Vista doesn't like widescreens with a 128mb integrated card that the s7700n has, I guess???

Therefore, my aunt came to her senses and got a tower that is somewhat expandable without catching on fire. I hope.

marf

Aunts Computer

Comments (3)

theroselvr

randy_ca

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