New AMD integrated graphics is as good as low end graphics card plus you can add a PCIe graphics card for dual card - best of both worlds for all but the hard core gamer or professional CAD or Graphics apps
mate with AMD quad core for best value
Intel may have better performance at only the very top end- add $1000
I guess my days of overclocking and playing with expensive graphics cards are over. But if the $$/performance tradeoff is significant, I would go AMD over Intel. But if you're going to look at 4 CPU (Quad cores), does AMD compare to Intel? I don't do CAD/CAM, and I'm not a gamer, but HD has appeal, especially if you have a good panel. Do today's PCIe cards have HDMI ports? I've not done a lot of research lately, but its amazing how technology is scaling today especially considering it has not slowed in 25 years. I need to find a good PC architecture site and refresh my memory now that I've been retired for over 2 years.
OK, one final addition to this experiment....I was abkle to find a 1GB SODIMM for this laptop. It had a total of 512MB (two 256MB DIMMs) and I removed one piece of 256MB and added the new 1GB DIMM. Now the system can only address 1GB according to the user manual, but Windows sees the 1.256GB, but can olny use 756MB (the original 256, plus only 512MB of the new 1GB DIMM) So I increased my RAM by 50%. Well the 1hour 31min run time for Avast did not change very much at all (went down to 1hour 27min). So adding RAM is a deadend for Avast purposes. An like I said before, the CPU was maxing out at 100% utilization, so that is the best I think I will see with this old laptop.
Thanks and so-long to all that helped.
Oh yes, one more thing...my spyware checker did improve in its time very significantly, so it was worth the time and effort.
Cheers!
