I have a gateway,windows xp and 40gb and 512 ram.my ? is how big of a hard drive can i get.?

Question

I do not know any thing about my mother board to tell u if it is capable to handle any thing.I do not have an instruction manual but i just want my computer to have a litlle bit of snap to it.Right now i got more stuff on it and i can tell it is slowing down.I put a 256 of ram in it for a total of 512 ram.i just want to beef it up....kind of like a car...u know?Give it a tune up so it will respond when i want it too when i tell it too instead of the hesitation that i recieve.Help me.

Answer 1

it will probably have a bios limit of about 127gigs but u can partition the drive and use the whole thing anyway if u get a larger one ..

Answer 2

you'll be safe around 250... possibly 300GB but like the other person said if not you can partition it, what you should do is keep the 40gb drive as your boot drive and use the other for storage, im running mine like that i find its a lot faster because the boot drive is empty and it makes reformatting a breeze when u get a nasty virus or whatever. If you want to push it that bit further you should get a graphics card if you dont have one already... even if you dont play games just a geforce 6200 or something, it will free up your RAM and you'll actually have 512mb. But you'llhave to make sure the pc has agp, usually if the expansion slot usually at the top is brown and out of line of the others its agp lol

Answer 3

if your using FAT32 you have a 127 gig limitation, you can convert to NTFS if you want. the mother board will probably handle larger.

also if you do get a drive lager then supported you can always partician it in to logical drives

However this most likely won't speed up your PC unless your disk is so full theres no room for a page file.

If you have more then 50% space you should be ok, i would add as much ram as you could if you want to speed it up

Answer 4

usually if you upgrade from original factory spec you can go upto 2.5 of the factory spec,ie:40gb x 2.5=100gb, same,but different multiple factor applies to RAM,256mb x 3=768mb,also make sure you cache for internet files etc is between 10-25mb as this can REALLY slow down your pc.try also using isys system cleaner,i used it once a week,its a good piece of software.hope this helps.

Answer 5

Hard drive is a storage, you store data on it . if you out of storage you get bigger hard drive but what will give your computer a jump is more ram 512MB is to little in today's applications remove that and buy 2 sticks of ram 1GB each total of 2GB and see the difference then.

Answer 6

Hard drive size should be as big as you like. Just make sure you get one like the original as far as EIDE or SATA goes. If you get one with a 8MB cache it should be faster than the old one.