Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

gateway ta6 laptop

(1/14) > >>

holt:
i have a gateway ta6 laptop, a.k.a. model cx2724. i know it's slow but it's all i've got. it has two 500mb ram sticks. according to this link, my max upgrade limit is two 1-gb ram sticks. before i commit to buy them, can anyone confirm if i can get two 2gb or 4gb ram sticks instead?

tomos:
have you tried any other site e.g. http://www.crucial.com

holt:
found this. still a 2gb (2 x 1gb) limit.

holt:
I recently acquired the Gateway TA6 laptop, with problems:
-Napster shows up in Control Panel Add/Remove programs and nowhere else and refuses to go away.
-PC MightyMax 2009 shows in systray (lower right desktop) and nowhere else and refuses to go away.
-It is a Win XP Tablet, and I would like to disable the Desktop 'Tablet PC Input Panel' somehow.
-I will never use the Motorola fax feature in systray and wonder how to disable it.
-How can I selectively disable McAfee safe web browsing?
Any helpful sugs would be greatly appreciated.

IainB:
Interesting.
The definitive guide as to a laptop's specification for things like RAM, bus, CPU and other features will usually be the specifications pages in the full User Guide (not a brochure).
If you do not have a hard or softcopy of the guide (the softcopy would usually be a PDF file), then it should be easy to download one from the manufacturer's site.
You will need to be able to correctly identify the laptop. Correct identification tags are usually displayed on difficult-to-remove stickers on the laptop underside or maybe sometimes in the battery compartment, and some of them will probably also be displayed in the system details in the operating system.

Identification tags for any given build of laptop will include things such as (for example):

* Model Number
* Serial Number
* Manufacturer ID (e.g., DELL and Gateway have their own peculiar ID numbering schemes).
For confirmation of identification, knowing the Operating System in the original as-built model might help, though this would probably be independent of hardware specs (i.e., the hardware specs wouldn't necessarily vary if there was a different OS installed).
From experience, armed with the above information, documentation and system drivers (even for old laptop models) are usually easy to find and download from the manufacturer's support website.

So, I would suggest that you go to the Gateway Official Support Site: Worldwide
Then:
1. Select your country.
2. On the next page that appears, select on the horizontal Support bar the Drivers & Downloads "button".
3. On the next page you will see that there are 3 options to:

* Search by Serial Number or SNID (I would guess SNID is a DELL-specific ID and relates to the as-built spec.)
* Search by Product Model
* Select my product from a list
You will eventually get to the CX series of numbers, and the search granularity seems to stop at CX2720 for your model, so it should be included there.

However, when I went through these steps assuming country-US and took the third option where I assumed that the OS was a Vista version and 32-bit, I drew a blank.
From the menu that appeared below on that page, I selected the Documents tab and was presented with a list that included these download links:
Gateway Notebook Hardware Reference
Gateway User Guide Gateway Notebook

Annoying, these documents were "generic" documents and neither of them referred to hardware specs. - which I found quite surprising.
I didn't inspect the other documentation listed as it was all labelled "Generic UG".
By the way, you can also download system drivers (software) and a BIOS update from that site, so my visit there might not have been a complete waste of time.

I then did a duckgo search for Specification for Gateway Model ta6 laptop cx2720, and came up with this link: http://gatewaycomputers.wikia.com/wiki/CX2720
I'm unsure whether it is authoritative, but it does state there that RAM is:
     1GB PC2-5300 DDR2 memory standard (max 2GB)
- so it seems that you are probably stuck with that max RAM constraint.

You could consider a potential workaround to the constraint (to some extent) by installing a fast (C10 min.) memory card - that laptop apparently has an Integrated 5-in-1 Card Reader - and using that as a Ramdrive, but I am unsure whether that would give a useful performance improvement. You'd have to "suck-it-and-see".

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page