hardware upgrade, HDD, RAM etc

[Charlie Kravetz]

On Sat, 2008-03-22 at 02:42 +0100, Zhengguo Xu wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> i was  considering upgrade HDD and memory of my Dell Inspiron 9300
> laptop and have a couple of questions.
> 
> 1. from the purchase list i got when i bought the laptop, i have a
> "100GB IDE hard drive" and when i took the driver out there's "Hitachi
> IDE/ATA" printed on it. the HDD i wanted (at low price in store) is
> simply said "HDD 250GB SATA" for laptop. now, from the limited
> knowledge i have, ATA, or PATA, is different from SATA. does it mean i
> cannot use this SATA drive in my laptop? however, when i looked in
> Ubuntu's "Device Manager", it has sth like
> "/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_serial_1ATA_Hitachi_HTS7210........" the phase "serial_1ATA" appeared quite lot. does it mean SATA? I'm a newbie so got a little confused. any help here?
> 
> 2. i had Intel Pentium M 780 CPU with FSB 533MHz. my old memory card
> is 1GB at 533MHz memory bus. the memory card in the store is DDR2
> 2048/667, i guess that means 2048MB at 667MHz memory bus (same price
> as the one with 533MHz). so, can i use this new card?
> 
> if i need provide more infomation, what command should i type? i'm not
> a fan of command-line so a hint here is necessary.
> 
> many thanks.
> 
I can help with part of this, but someone else will step in with more
information, please. 

The hard drives are _not_ the same. PATA is a "Parallel Advanced
Technology Attachment", also known as IDE and ATAPI interfaces. SATA is
"Serial ATA", and uses an entirely differently connector. These two
drives are not the same and can not be swapped for each other.

The memory, is another story. You first mention the speed of the Front
Side Bus (FSB) which is not the memory bus. A 533 FSB does not mean
533Mhz memory, as my own system is running a 1.5Ghz cpu with memory that
is 512MB, DDR400 DIMMs that run at either 400Mhz or 333Mhz, depending on
the actual cpu in the motherboard at the time.
-- 
Charlie Kravetz 
Linux Registered User Number 425914          [http://counter.li.org/]
Never let anyone steal your DREAM.           [http://keepingdreams.com]