My experience to upgrade graphic card
Since Windows Vista told me I can get a system performance boost if I upgrade my video card(see my previous post), I decided to give it a try even the Aero glass interface is working, and I am not a big gamer.
Calling HP first for information about how I should do it, I was told the mother board supports PCI-Express card that is what I should look for. They also told me to upgrade the power supply since it is only 300W. Great!
After searching on line for a few hours, I find one, eGForce - 7100, that requires only 250W as a minimum and with a memory of 128M, but when I got TigerDiscount to buy it, they told me that I have to upgrade my power supply. And the problem is they did not know which power supply I should buy, since they do not which will fit into the Canpaq tower.
Then I go to Best Buy trying to find one there, however, I played instead with a few models they are selling. What I found is that even a good graphic card like the GForce 7600 256M still has a problem same as me. The performance message can be accessed like this: Go to Control Panel, System performance and Tools, then click Advanced tools at the left pane, you will see Performance can be improved by changing visual setting. View detail. If you click View performance details in Event log, you will get this:
The Desktop Window Manager is experiencing heavy resource contention.
Scenario : Video memory resources are over-utilized and there is thrashing happening as a result. Reducing number of running programs and open windows may help resolve this condition.
Well, even a gForce 7600 will get the same thing, why should bother with it?
