btw, if I had the option to swap for another laptop, it would probably be this one:
http://shopper.cnet.com/notebooks/hp...85.html#info-5

It's similar to mine but has an 18.4" screen and an NVidia 9800M GT. Put a solid state drive in there and you will probably hit a 5.8 on Windows Performance Index. It is a bit pricier but if you are a gamer, you will probably be MUCH happier!

Thanks for the heads up. I think I will for for sure go with BH to get mine. That saves me over $100.

Anyone know where to get some good ram for this laptop to upgrade it to 6GB or 8GB?

You are much better off spending $300 on an 80 gig Intel SSD than on 8 gigs of RAM the performance gains would be much more noticeable. The only real benefits off that much RAM will be for running several virtual machines, but if you got the cash for both then go for it.

Awesome. I will go ahead and do that then. Just wanted the better performance!

I run Firefox with 35 tabs open and it takes up 650mb. I run Photoshop with 10 large images open, Visual Studio, Torrent Client, and Multiple Virtual Machines with up to 1-2GB each and I still have RAM left over. I also use an 8GB SD Card for Readyboost. It has a read speed of about 7500kB/s and write speed of about 4000kB/s. When I put the SSD drive in there, the write speed of that SD card jumped to over 100,000kB/s but the read speed was the same. The SSD makes a HUUUGE difference!

And as far as SSD prices go, the best bang for the buck is a 128GB. 32GB was like $180, 64GB was about $250, 128GB was $259, and 256GB was $650.

That is an amazing jump with the SSD. I am pretty sure that is how I am going to set up my system. Thanks for all the help with customizing my laptop.

Btw, those numbers are only from the SD card used for readyboost. The SSD speed is about 150MB/s read/write with bursts much higher. Visual Studio opens in less than a second with the SSD. Full HD search without indexing takes about 45sec-1.5min with 60GB used and a lot of files.

Don't listen to the SSD badmouthers. Do research on the brand you buy. A lot of advancements in SSD technology have been made since the bad publicity started and they are VERY much worth the $$.

I use a Patriot SSD.

There are really only 2 SSD's that are worth investing your money into. The intel x-25m and the ocz vertex, both available from newegg. The others on the market are plagued by stuttering problems and require a great deal of tweaking. I would heavily consider those if you are going to invest in a SSD.

Thanks for the tip MoffiaJ. I didn't know much about SSD flaws when I bought mine. I thought they were all fast and worked good. Luckily Patriot drives work well.

I am using 64-bit Vista Ultimate stripped down of the non-essentials. I didn't do anything else to it.

I added my 4th benchmark now. PerformanceTest score was 1381. I had about 1150 at first and that was when it was DOWNCLOCKED to about 1500MHz from Intel SpeedStep. This test was running off the AC instead of battery this time. Anybody know why it says I submitted one less than I actually did? I didn't get any "Credits" for all of them either.

now you got the #1 passmark score.

Right on!

So is there a place to submit PCMark scores? The newer 3DMarks won't work on my computer because the resolution isn't supported.

I believe the base HP DV7-2040US comes with two 250 GB 5400 RPM drives. What drives did you add to your system. Especially the 128 GB solid state drive. I'd like make/model information so I can purchase drives that work in this machine. Thanks!